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A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick

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This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. `The Country at my Shoulder': Gender and Belonging

in Three Contemporary Women Poets

by

Jane Taylor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirementsfor the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Women and Gender Studies

University of Warwick, Centre for the Study of Women and Gender

December2001 Table of Contents

Abstract IV ...... Introduction 1 ...... Chapter 1. Politics Poetics 17 and ......

Chapter 2. `The contrary passionto be whole' :

The Poetry Eavan Boland 52 of ...... 3. Michele Roberts: Healing the Splits 142 Chapter ......

Chapter 4. Where do you come from?

in Poetry Jackie Kay 239 StrategicIdentities the of ...... Conclusion 321 ...... Bibliography 329 ......

ii Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Emma Francis for her support and encouragement.Thanks also go to Judith, Shafquatand Nadeem for their constant and supportive friendship. A very big thank you to Bill Davies, and to Ben and Max, for putting up with my absencewhile I wrote my `long story'.

ill Abstract.

This study considersthe work of three women poets writing in English during the period 1970-2000.I arguethat the poets, EavanBoland, Michele Roberts and Jackie Kay are all `hybrid' voices, positionedand positioning themselveson the borders between different cultures and traditions. Locating the poets within a specific social, cultural and intellectual context the study considersthe different ways in which the poets negotiatethese mixed heritagesand how genderinteracts with their cultural location to affect the poetic identities they inhabit.

My study of Eavan Boland locates her as a post-colonial poet writing out of a very specific historical relationship with Britain. I arguethat the effects of this relationship are explored in two ways; the political and psychic legacy of the British colonisation of Ireland but also the ways in which women in Ireland have been colonised by a nationalist poetic tradition. I show how Boland interrogatesthese different colonisations and drawing on the work of Homi Bhabha I arguethat Boland finds her own hybrid spacein the Dublin suburbsfrom where she exploresthe frictions between a number of conflicting positions.

My study of Michele Roberts exploresthe effects of her dual French and English heritage on her writing. I arguethat Roberts' desire to embraceboth aspectsof her identity manifestsitself as a desire to reconcile what western dualistic thinking has split and separated.I consider how Roberts advocatesa writing and reading practise which asksus to embracethe strangerwithin ourselvesand so begin to heal the split within individuals and nations.

My chapter on Kay explores how shenegotiates the cultural specificity of her location as a Scottish writer who identifies as black and how her poetry complicates questionsof cultural authority and theories of cultural hybridity. I arguethat Kay through a focus on `performance' as both theme and aestheticsubverts simple fixed notions of identity.

I conclude that all three poets problematiseany simple notion of home and belonging as a fixed and immutable space.Rather they inhabit borderlands,unsettled spaces, where there is a constant interaction and reformulation of identity.

IV Introduction.

There's a country at my shoulder,

growing larger - soon it will burst,

riverswill spill out, run downmy chest.(1)

These lines are from a poem by Moniza Alvi. The country at her shoulderis her

country of birth, Pakistan,and this poem dealswith the feelings of being locatedin

one culture, Britain, while still being part of anothervery different culture andthe

tensions and creative possibilities this location provides.

One of the notable featuresof poetry during the last three decadesis the number of

poets who position themselvesoutside or on the margins of English mainstream

culture. Many poets writing in Britain are `hybrid' voices, standing on the borders

betweendifferent, sometimesmultiple, cultures, backgroundsand languages. This

location is particularly complex and, I hope to show, creative for women poets who,

as I will demonstratein chapter 1, have already been forced to inhabit a marginal

position in the poetry world.

The three poets whose work I am considering here also have a country at their

shoulder. All three poets are women, write in the English languageand have

publishedtheir work predominantly in Britain and Ireland. However, they bring to their writing a mixed heritage, some constituting `difference' which locates them outside the boundariesof the English cultural centre. Eavan Boland is an Irish writer, based in Dublin, whose work negotiatesthe

relationship betweenthe Anglo - Irish and native Irish traditions. Boland's first

collection of poemsNew Territory was published in 1967 (2) when she was only 23

and her most recent collection The Lost Land was published in 1998.(3) Her work

thus spansthe whole period from 1970-2000. Boland writes as a `daughterof

colony' (4) and her work is concernednot only with the legacy of the British

colonisation of Ireland but also the colonisation of the Irish woman by a national

tradition. My chapter on Boland will focus on the ways her poetry and her prose

interrogate these different colonisations and how she exploresthe relationship

between the two. As a poet sheis concernedto interrogate and break down the fusion

in Irish poetry of women and nation and so reveal the coststo both women and

nation of this equation. Themesof dispossessionand exile and the searchfor some

connection are prevalent in Boland's work in relation to language,country and to a

matrilinear tradition. This exile also extendsto her own sexedbeing. I explore how

Boland makes connectionsbetween these different lossesand the extent to which her

own subjectivity and insights are useful in exploring the more generalposition of the

woman poet in a national tradition. The specificity of Ireland will be consideredand

the usefulnessand limitations of post-colonial theory in this context.

Michele Roberts is both French and English, two colonising powers with a long

history of rivalry and opposition and shewrites at a time when Britishness is having to embracethe `other' of Europe and reconsider its own identity. This mixed heritage

her of Roberts' work - ProtestantEnglish and Catholic French - and relation of this to a `bisexual aesthetic' is what I want to focus on in her work. Roberts is seenas one of the key British poets of the 70s and 80s who are associatedwith the women's

2 liberationmovement in Britain andher work canbe readintertextually as

representativeof some of the shifts in the politics and theory of feminism in Britain

during this time. Her first collection of poems, The mirror of the mother, was

published in 1986 (5) but by this time she had already published a number of

fictional works. The influence of her French heritage can be seenin her positive

engagementwith French theory particularly the psychoanalyticideas of Jacques

Lacan and their revision by Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, her surrealist style and

the pervasive influence of French Catholicism with its focus on the `maternal.' This

is interspersedwith a particularly English cultural feminism.

Jackie Kay is the daughterof a white Scottishmother and a black Nigerian father

and was adopted as a baby by a white working class Scottish couple. Kay brings to

her writing these heritagesand explores issuesof identity and subjectivity through

the creation of different voices and accents.In this way she challengesstereotypes

and expectationsabout colour, sexuality and many other facets of identity. The voices that Kay createsin her writing addressthe problem of how we relate and

construct alliances acrossthe histories of difference when those histories themselves

shapeus through division, power and domination. As with Boland and Roberts, the specificity of Kay's location as a Scottishwriter who identifies as black brings into play and complicates questionsof cultural authority and simple divisions between the centre and the margins. Kay is the youngest of the three poets I am considering and published her first collection, TheAdoption Papers, in 1991 (6) although her work had appearedin anthologies and magazinesfrom the mid 80s.

3 All three poets can be said to bring a hybrid identity to their work but the particular

configuration of this hybridity is complex and refusessimple oppositional or

appropriating labels. Their work both shows the usefulnessbut also the limitations of

theoretical models of cultural hybridity as developedby Homi Bhabha and other

post-colonial theorists and this is an areaI will pursue in this study.

Women poets writing and publishing today in Britain and Ireland are heterogeneous.

Although they may sharecommon concernsand themesand although it may even be

possible to discerna female aesthetic,their construction of a female subjectivity is

one shapedby a particular and specific interaction of gender,class, ethnicity,

sexuality and `race' located in a particular historical moment. The particular

historical moment within which I am positioning thesewomen is the period from the

early seventiesto the present.

The Period.

In looking at a contemporaryperiod, I am inevitably positioning myself to some

extent within a historicist approach.There are many dangersin this, not leastthat of reducing diverse and inchoate histories into neatly definable decadesand thereby shaping and homogenising a past. This is a trap which histories of the 1960shave fallen into, for example,with their accountsof a decadeassociated with radical freedoms and myths of a counterculture where Britain is supposedto have stepped out into a new era of sexual and moral freedom. Such a narrative has becomeso embeddedin our whole idea of the sixties that the term itself evokes in popular imagination an era of sexualrevolution and radical politics. Sucha narrative continuesto be invokedin its effecton subsequentdecades, so the breakdownof

4 family values and the uncertainty and diversity which has becomea narrative of the

eighties is often perceived as a legacy of the so-calledsexual and moral revolution of

the sixties. Other narratives,however, tell other stories. Writing of the literary and

intellectual ideas of the sixties, Patricia Waugh arguesthat:

`Outside largely hedonistic libertarianism this culture and the newly urgent ...

persisted a rather more austere,still influential if modified dissident culture of

middle-classliberal disaffection with roots in an Arnoldianand Leavisite belief that

literature as the best that has beenthought and said, might still saveus. And behind

each of these emergent,oppositional or dissident cultures continued an official

adherenceto economic, political, and cultural assumptionsabout consensuswhich,

though fragmenting since the 50s would not be fundamentally challengeduntil the

mid-seventies.' (7)

Similarly the 1980s are now often associatedwith Thatcherism, a term that implies a

philosophy which pervaded the whole culture of Britain. Yet Thatcher'sgovernment

was in office from 1979-1991and the relationship between Thatcher's policymaking and literature produced in Britain in this period is complex. Texts do not simply recover a factual historical reality. The literature of any period both reflects and is a constitutive factor in the shaping of the stories of the age. Waugh arguesthat any period of history is always in part a construction from within an age of its own sense of itself.

`a number of explanatory paradigmsacross the spheresof politics, economics, cultureand society will competefor dominance.In turn, suchparadigms inevitably come under the scrutiny of later historical commentatorswho are themselvesin part

(and unconsciouslytoo) determinedby what they survey. Any attempt to understand

an age from within will be unavoidably implicated in a never-endingand finally

impossible unravelling of theorisationsand myths which operateas much to

constitute the identity of a time as to offer a commentaryupon that identity. ' (8)

Nevertheless,I feel strongly that each text speaksto someextent from its moment of

production and despitethe heterogeneityin what has come to be called new

historicist perspectivesand methodologiesI find myself in agreementwith what

Veeser seesas the five key assumptionsthat unite suchpractise. He summarises

them as follows:

" `thatevery expressive act is embeddedin a networkof materialpractices;

" that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition usesthe tools it condemns

andrisks falling prey to the practiceit exposes;

" that literary and non-literary `texts' circulate inseparably;

" that no discourse,imaginative or archival, gives accessto unchangingtruths nor

expressesinalterable human nature;

finally, language describe " ... that a critical method and adequateto culture under

capitalism participate in the economythey describe.' (9)

The logic of historicism implies that the point from which the critic speaksis as unsettled by historicism as the object she studies and that therefore I am not an objective or innocent critic. In this introduction, then, I am going to give a necessarilyselective and partial overview of some of the contexts,social, cultural

6 and theoretical in which poetry has been and is being produced and read during this

period. In so doing I am not focusing on `imaginary moments of absolute crisis and

change', but attempting some understandingof `the interrelationships betweenthe

various political and cultural paradigmswhich shapethe senseof a period.' (10)

1970-2000: Narratives of Conflict and Consensus.

In 1977 Tom Nairn published his influential book The Break-Up of Britain in which

he characterisesthe periodas one reflecting the endof a post-warconsensus. Nairn

outlinesa numberof factorswhich he regardsas contributing to this shift andin

particular looks at the demise of the concept of Englishnessas the valid description

of a state of mind transcendingregional, classand subcultural difference. (11) A

constellation of events and effects come together herewhich can be read as a

narrative of discontinuity. The period begana radical reconsiderationof the idea of

Britishness which gained momentumin the 1980sand continued into the 1990s.The

burgeoning nationalism in Scotland and Wales and the resurgenceof what has been

termed the `Troubles' in Northern Ireland called into questionthe `unitedness' of the

U. K. In 1969 British troops were sent once more into Northern Ireland, in 1971 internment without trial was introduced, in 1972 the then ConservativePrime

Minister, Edward Heath, announceddirect-rule and abolishedStormont. In 1974

Welsh and Scottish devolution enteredthe political agendaonce more and although in 1978 devolution bills for both were defeated,Scottish and Welsh nationalisms remained important dissident voices culminating in the creation of both a Scottish

Parliament and a National Assembly for Wales in 1999. In Ireland too, despitethe continuing conflict, a Northern Ireland Assembly was createdin 1998.

7 At the sametime as the U. K. was beginning the processof internal devolution, the

demandfor labour generatedby the economic growth of the 50s and 60s saw a great

wave of migration to Britain from Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean and the

Indian sub-continent.By the late 70s/80sBritain had a significant black indigenous

presence.The 1991census, which was the first to include a question on ethnicity,

indicated that 5.5 percent (just over 3 million people) of the U. K. population

identified themselvesas belonging to one of the ethnic groups which did not include

white people. The 2001 censusis likely to show an increaseon this.

In addition Britain's relationship with Europe was changing.In 1973 the U. K. joined

the EuropeanCommunity, now the EuropeanUnion. In 1994the Channel Tunnel

was openedcreating a rail link betweenEngland and France.Britishness has

increasingly over this period come to be defined in relation to Europe. While for

many people such close links with Europe are seenas positive, for others a

mythology of European legal dictates and economic policies has arisen against which many people are assertinga `national culture' that they feel is coming under attack.

Against this fragmentationand diversity, compoundedby the deeply divisive and disenfranchising social policies of the Thatcher government,the period produced another narrative of Britain. This was Thatcher's hegemonicidea of British nationhood which combined a `heritage' senseof the past with echoesof a dimly rememberedimperialism and greatness.Thatcher as secondBritannia and saviour of the nation becamea popular cultural image. As Ian Bell argues:

8 `The successfulmarketing of this curious Anglocentric ideological concoction was

one of the key factors in Thatcher's dominanceof British politics for so long,

making her the custodian and representativeof all things British, and turning

disagreementswith party policy into an unpatriotic activity, a new kind of petty

treason.' (12)

Many texts of this period interrogate ideas of Britishness and explore the different intersections of national identity with race, gender, classand sexuality. This concern with British identity is present in all genres and modes of writing. (13) Bell's

discussionof travel narrativesof the 80s, for example,finds that where the writers are in pursuit of `truth', a grand narrative of Britishness, they find only `a conflict of different moods and attitudes.' He discussesthe work of writers such as Paul

Theroux andJonathon Raban and concludesthat in place of an encompassing national identity they find lingering loyalties to place and class.(14) With the devolution of Britain has come a crisis in English identity. In the late 90s more and more texts are interrogating what it meansto be English and exploring the specific constituentsof an English ethnicity. (15)

The Importance of Feminism.

New social movementsalso produced a new focus for the politics of collective identities, with their concernswith gender, sexuality and race. The impact of second wave feminism is of particular significance. In 1970the first women's liberation conferencewas held in Oxford. Although exclusive of the majority of women, it marked the start of a proliferation of feminist ideasinto the mainstreamof British social, cultural and intellectual life. The idea of a sharedoppression which unites

9 women in their strugglewas central to the developmentof feminist politics in the

late 60s and 70s. By the end of the 70s, however, such universality had been challenged. Differences betweenwomen in terms of race, sexuality, geographical

location and other facets of identity came to the fore, bringing with them the

emergenceof identity politics within the feminist movementand a shift in the

analysis and explanationof women's oppression.

Feminist theory and politics influenced culture and literature in a number of ways.

On a practical level the establishmentof women's publishing companiesand both formal and informal writing groups were instrumental in giving women spaceto explore and value their writing. All three writers in my study have at different times been involved with women's writing groups as practitioners or as teachersor both.

All have to different degreesrelied on feminist pressesand journals to publish collections of their work. This is particularly so with Michele Roberts whose early work was published in feminist journals and by the new feminist publishers and who was herself poetry editor of SpareRib for a time. Spare Rib itself was establishedin

July 1972 and despite its many changesthrough its lifetime it was arguablyone of the most successfuland influential women's liberation publications. It was significant in providing a spacefor fiction and poetry by women which explored their experienceand reflected the insights gainedby the consciousnessraising of the

70s. An important part of this was the permissionit gave women to valuetheir lives and their feelings and to find a voice. Feministtheories critiqued the phallocentric natureof knowledge,and in literature, feminist ideasinfluenced reading andwriting practiseby challengingthe values of the canon and the literary establishmentand exploring the effectsof our genderon our writing and reading selves.

10 The literary canon andthe notion of a pure aestheticvalue were also challengedby

other marginalisedgroups such as black and lesbianwriters. Theoreticaldevelopments

which gainedmomentum in the early seventiessuch aspost-structuralism and post-

colonialism intersectedwith developingfeminist theory. Common to these

developmentswere recurring themessuch as the decline of a strong steadyundivided

subjectivity, the refusalof canonisedforms, the loss of faith in any pure and separate

spacefor art or belief, the emphasison differenceand the stresson the hiddenand marginal. All this contributedto a senseof a crisis of value and a decline in consensual aesthetics.

The Poets.

It is within this context, this constellationof moments,that the poets I am considering have written and published. I have selectedthe poets for a number of reasons.In their writing and publication in magazinesand then in anthologiesand individual collections they spanthe whole period from 1972until the present.

Michele Roberts and EavanBoland were writing in the early 70s and Jackie Kay beganto publish in the late 80s. All continue to publish today. One of the most challenging and exciting aspectsof researchingcontemporary writers is this ongoing production of work. While I am finishing a chapter on a writer she will publish a newtext creatinga fluid andconstant interchange of ideason theoryand practise and ensuringthat my critical positioningof her work doesnot becomefixed andstatic.

They all write in differentstyles, from the surrealistpoetry of Robertsto the lyricism of Bolandto the dramaticand conversational style of Kay.Though all experimentin

11 their work with different stylesand genres,their poetic voices are significantly

different from each other and representativeof the diversity of women poets today.

As poets all three have some sort of relationship with feminism in their work

although they perceive this relationship in different ways. As hybrid writers their

relationship with feminism is suffusedwith issuesof ethnicity, `race' and nation as well as sexuality and class.

The Use of Theory.

My own positionality as a white Scottishwoman, working-class by birth but middle- classby profession, working in academiaat a particular moment and having gone through a particular education will inevitably affect my reading of the texts. I have tried to let the theory arise from my critical analysis of the poetry itself and the texts of the writers rather than impose a closed reading from the outset. In situating the writers within a particular period and in drawing on non-literary texts in my situating of the poets, I am aware of positioning myself in a historicist / cultural materialist camp. (16)

However this is a broad and eclectic church. Dollimore and Sinfield define the term cultural materialism as designatinga critical method which has four characteristics- an attention to historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis. (17) In my reading of these three poets I utilise these four characteristics.As I have argued above each text speaksfrom its moment of production and cannot claim to be universal and timeless. The writing of the women poetsdiscussed here needs to be seenin the contextof the culturesof the time,

12 dominant, emergentand oppositional. A concernwith theoretical method enables

me to utilise the lessonsof psychoanalysisand post-colonialism to namebut two

theoretical approacheswhich have been relevant since the 70s. Even if eschewing

the tenets of a particular theory I would argue that it is impossible not to have been

affected by the so-called `revolutions' in literary theory of the past three decades.

`Cultural materialism does not pretend to political neutrality. It knows that there is

no cultural practice that is without political significance.' (18) This explicit political

commitment, its attentionto the marginal, subordinateand displacedin culture and

its use and revisiting of Marxist and feminist theory is important to me. What a writer

can say and how she can sayit are conditionedby the generalideology of the period, by

the aestheticideology of the period and by the modesof literary production,distribution

and reception;the publishing and literary industry. Her individual and concrete

experienceof theseconditions is significant. The emphasison close textual analysis

using techniquessuch as structuralism and post-structuralismto mark a break with the so-called `new criticism' with its framework of conservativesocial assumptions is also sympatheticto my approach. Too often the actual words of a text and the voice of the poet are lost in a swamp of theoretical word-play.

I alsomake use of the insightswhich a feminist return to psychoanalysishas produced drawing both on the tradition of object relationstheory andthe theoreticalreworkings of Freud and Lacan by Frenchfeminist critics suchas Cixous and Kristeva. While cultural materialismprivileges externalstrictures and how theseare experienced internally, psychoanalysisfocuses on the internal subjectivity of the female,and her genderedconstruction in language.

13 Post-colonial theory and its intersectionswith feminist ideasalso prove useful in

`reading' these texts. In particular the work of Homi Bhabha and his redefining of

the concept of `hybridity' is useful in considering the mixed heritagesand influences

of these poets. His analysis of coloniser and colonised relations stressesthe

interdependenceand mutual constitution of their subjectivities. Colonial identities on

both sides are constantly in a state of flux, are unstable and `agonised' rather than

fixed and oppositional. This undercutsboth colonising and colonised claims to a

`pure' or authentic identity. Bhahba's work in its focus on the liminal, the `in- between' as `the spacethat carriesthe burden and meaningof culture' (19) is useful in reading these poets who position themselvesat the intersectionsof different cultural traditions. In its challengeto dualistic thinking and binary oppositions, it parallels and intersectswith such challengesfrom feminist theory.

Structure.

My first chapter will look at the critical and theoretical context in which women's poetry was being received. Through a survey of anthologies and critical works I interrogate the extent to which the mainstreampoetry industry in the U. K. was receptive to new voices from women and how the woman poet was constructedby that industry. I then consider the extent to which feminist politics has provided a cultural spacefor women's expressionand the ways in which it has done this.

Questionsof politico-aesthetic evaluationand the emerging focus on difference are explored through a considerationof the use of the terms `British' and `English' in some anthologiesproduced from the 80s to the present. The complex relationship betweenwomen and national identity is also introduced hereto foreground the issues

14 raised in the next three chapters. Having introduced the context, the rest of my study

will evaluatethe work of three poets writing and publishing during this period.

Notes.

1. Moniza Alvi, `The Country At My Shoulder', The Country at My Shoulder

(Oxford: O. U. P., 1993),p. 34-35.

2. Eavan Boland, New Territory (Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co., 1967).

3. Eavan Boland, The Lost Land (Manchester:Carcanet, 1998).

4. EavanBoland, `Daughtersof Colony', The Lost Land (Manchester:Carcanet,

1998), p. 16.

5. Michele Roberts, The mirror of the mother (London: Methuen, 1986).

6. Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991).

7. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties (Oxford: O.U. P., 1995), p. 11.

8. ibid., p. 11.

9. H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism (Routledge: London, 1989),p. xi.

10. Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, p. 10.

11. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, (London: Verso, 1981).

12. Ian Bell, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in ContemporaryBritish

Fiction (Cardiff University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 10.

13. See for example Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber and

Faber, 1993) or Douglas Dunn, Barbarians (London: Faber and Faber, 1979) or

Tony Harrison, V (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,1989).

14. Ian Bell, `To see ourselves:travel narratives and national identity in contemporary Britain' in Peripheral Visions, pp. 6-27.

15 15. Seefor example JeremyPaxman, The English: A portrait of a People (London:

Michael Joseph, 1998) and Simon Heller, Nor Shall My Sword: The Reinventionof

England (London: Weidenfeld, 1999).

16. Thesetwo positions are often lumped together although there are differences

betweenthem. In Britain the work of the cultural critic RaymondWilliams has been

influential in the development of cultural materialist perspectives.For a discussionof the differences betweenthe two perspectivessee, for example, Paul Hamilton,

Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996).

17. JonathonDollimore and Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare(Manchester:

M. U. P, 1994),Foreword, p.vii

18. ibid., p.viii

19. Homi Bhabbha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

16 Chapter 1.

Politics And Poetics.

The Woman Poet and the Poetic Establishment.

Lying awake in a provincial town

I think about poets. They are mostly

men, or Irish, turn out old yellow

photographs,may use four letter words,

stick pigs or marry twice, and edit

most of the books and magazines.

Most poets, who are men, and get to the bar first at poetry readings, don't like us fey or feminist, too old, too young, or too intense, and monthlies to them are just the times when very few needus.

Gowned like women in funereal black they have friends who went punting on the Cam. I'm not too clear what others did in Oxford, except avoid the traffic, bathe in fountains, drunkenly,a differentshade of blue.

17 Mostly they teach, and some must be

fathers, but they have no stretchmarks

on their smooth stomachsto prove it.

At leastwe know our children

are our own. They can never really

tell, but poemsthey can be sureof. (1)

Elizabeth Bartlett's poem `Stretch Marks' from her collection The Czar is Dead was

published in 1986, approximately mid-point in the period I am reviewing and

satirisesthe poets most feted by the poetry establishmentin the 70s and 80s.

Although she mentions no poet by name the ghosts of Larkin, Heaney, Hughes,

Gunn and countlessothers are present.Her poem also commentson the male network and incestuousrelationships which exist between suchpoets and editors, reviewers and publishers.

How fair is Bartlett's attack here?A review of British mainstreamanthologies and critical works of the period finds little to arguewith in her construction of the poet as male and Irish. Despitethe number of anthologies of women's poetry published during this period, (2) most of the mixed anthologiesand critical reviews of poetry published in the U. K. and Ireland during this period pay little attention to poetry by women or are reductive or dismissive in their discussion.

For example Carcanet's anthology Ten English Poets published in 1976 (3) was seen by many critics as representinga 70s movement or consensus.The poets are all

18 male, eight of them studied at Oxford or Cambridge - not in itself a crime but

lending some weight to Bartlett's construction of the male poet. In terms of poetic

styles the collection values the lyrical, the cerebraland the traditional in form and metre. An even more `important' anthology was published in 1982. This was the

Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry edited by Andrew Motion and Blake

Morrison. (4) The editors include five women and fifteen men and in their

introduction again value reasonand intellect and are suspiciousof the passionate,the polemical and the confessional,adjectives often applied to women's poetry and indeed to women. This volume claims to representa turning point in literary history, a decisive shift in sensibility and is written very much againstthe anthologiesof the

1950s and 60s. The women poets included in Motion and Morrison's anthology are

Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens,Anne Stevenson,Penelope Shuttle and Medbh

McOuckian. Of these five, the first three are the most consistentlyanthologised in mixed anthologiescovering this period. All three have consciously and publicly distancedthemselves from the label of `woman' or `feminist' poet claiming poetry as a genderlessspace. (5)

Bloodaxe, one of the better publishers for women, published The New Poetry in

1993 representing`the best poetry written in the British Isles in the 1980s and early

1990sby a distinctive new generation of poets'. (6) The Bloodaxe anthology celebratespluralism and diversity and firmly establishesa link betweenpolitics and poetry. Thus they see much of the poetry of the 80s as written as a responseto

Thatcherism,post-colonial Britain and the death of a national consensus. Produced by an all-male editorial team, lessthan a third of the new poets were women (17 out of 55), although all three of the poets I consider in my study were included. This

19 representsthe best of the mixed genderanthologies. Two anthologiespublished in

1998 take the sameperiod and geographicalterritory although with slightly different

agendas.The Penguin Book of Poetryfrom Britain and Ireland since 1945 (7) has

still more than twice as many male poets as women poets. This is surprising given

that the stressof the editors is on pluralism and diversity, one of the driving forces of

which, they acknowledge,is gender. SeanO'Brien's The Fire Box. Poetry in Britain

and Ireland afterl945 is better in terms of its representationand its

acknowledgementof the contribution made by women poets, including those outside

the English cultural centre. (8)

There are many other examples.The approachof the millenium inevitably heralded

retrospectiveanthologies. The Harvill Book of Twentiethcentury Versein English

edited by Michael Schmidt representsthe best of these both in numbers and in variety of poetic voices by women. Nearly one quarter of the poets hereare women and each poet is representedby a selection of poems. Significantly the title which alludes to twentieth century verse `in English' meansthat Schmidt includes

American, Australian and Irish writers also. In his Preface Schmidt arguesthat his selection `insists not on plurality but continuity, ' on what he calls `a republic of poetry rather than an irreconcilable anarchy of factions.' (9) The Oxford Book of

English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks (10) follows a fairly conventional line.

The 1972 anthology edited by Helen Gardner containednine women poets only two of whom were twentieth century. (11) In Ricks' edition, where he claims to have used a meritocratic system of selection, paying no heedto genderagendas, there are

29 women poets out of 217, and only 8 of them are twentieth century. The New

Penguin Book of English Verse(12) devotes279 pagesout of 1100 plus to twentieth

20 century poems.Fewer than 30 poemsby women feature hereand no long ones. As

Dunmore says in her review: `Vital registersand qualities of late twentieth century

Their is baffling the the are missing ... absence and anthology's representationof twentieth century is diminished by it, as is the reader'spleasure. ' (13)

Anthologies which will be used in schoolsand collegesare particularly influential in shaping the views of the next generation of readers.Yet in Heaney and Hughes The

School Bag only 23 out of 271 poets are women. (14)

Bloodaxe's Sixty WomenPoets, edited by Linda France,was published in 1993, (15) the sameyear as Bloodaxe's The New Poetry. The main criterion for entry was two published volumes of work although she also includes a few poets who havejust published their first collection. What suchanthologies demonstrateis that there is no shortageof collections in print by female poets. Clearly, while women continue to be marginalisedby the literary establishmentand the publishing world, there is a continuing need for women-only anthologies.Indeed statistical analysis of women's inclusion in anthologiesof poetry would give one the impressionthat few women write poetry. Christine Fitton in an analysis of twentieth - century anthologieshas establishedratios as low as 1:9 (16) and although representationis normally now higher than that it is nowherenear equal.

Why does such inclusion matter? Despitethe criticisms made of anthologies,not least from poets themselves,(17) they are arguably the most influential resourcein the dissemination and mediation of poetry. They are used in schools, collegesand universities; they receive the attention of reviewers in both specialistand mainstream

21 press and perhapsmost significantly at this time they sell. While single books of

by individual known poetry poets are the hardest to sell, a reasonablywell - poet

might sell between 1000 and 2000 copies of a new book, anthologiescan sell and do

so in big numbers. This is particularly true of brand nameslike Penguin. As Tony

Lacey, director of Penguin books, asserts:

`Having the most potent publishing brand meansthat those charming and seductive

four `The Penguin Book ' dangeroustoo. They imply immense words of ... are authority and status. And they almost certainly confer longevity, becauseone of the problems with anthologiesof this kind is that they hang around.' (18)

The publishers have fulfilled the enormously expensivetask of producing an anthology, with its often very large but one-off permission fees and setting costs, and schoolshave paid out for setsof anthologies.An educationalestablishment also becomescomfortable with a book and is reluctant to changeit. This is evidencedby the fact that anthologies suchas Motion and Morrison's 1982 text and even

Alvarez's 1962 The New Poetry, both anthologieswith a critical and cultural agenda, are still `healthily in print on the Penguin list. ' As Tony Lacey argues suchtexts can quickly establisha new kind of canon.Indeed given the conservativebuying patterns of schoolsand other educationalestablishments, the book itself can becomethe canon - the poemswithin it are those that will be studied year after year by students.

(19) Anthologies then shapethe image of British poetry. During the twentieth century in particular, the development of poetry in Britain was linked with a successionof programmatic anthologieswhich often had openly positional prefaces setting the respectiveanthology off against those of earlier generations.This is true

22 of nearly all the anthologiesmentioned above.If poets are never included in the

canon-forming or canon-challenginganthologies they are unlikely to make it into the

popular ones either. What more populist or democratic anthologiessuch as The

Nation's Favourite Poemsdemonstrate is the interdependencebetween popular

literary taste and the institutions of education. (20) Thus anthologiesare significant

as vehicles of cultural values and canon mediation.

The anthologies of the 90s moved away from the dichotomy of modernismversus

anti-modernism which characterisedearlier anthologiesto a focus on a plurality of

writers and traditions. While this has given more spaceto women they are still under-representedor characterisedby the same few voices. Inevitably if women are not being included in anthologiesthey are unlikely to be given spacein referenceand critical works of the period.

The Oxford Companion to Twentieth- Century Poetry in English (21) edited by Ian

Hamilton includes biographical entries for equal numbers of British Isles and U. S. poets and representsalso Canadian,Australian and New Zealand writers. Out of

1500 poets only about 200 are women. Critical surveysof the period present the samepicture although with the added interest of what to do with the `women poets'.

British Poetry since 1970: a critical survey (22) doesn't seeany of the `outstanding poets of the decade' as female. Out of the 18 commissionedarticles only one deals critically and specifically with a woman poet; DeborahMitchell's comparison of realism in the works of Roy Fisher and Elaine Feinstein. Yet even here Feinstein is not free from the `taint' of the associationwith women poets. Discussing Feinstein's use of the personalin her work Mitchell writes; `But she is in no sensethe

23 compulsive annotator of domesticlife that we associatewith the title `woman poet':

her poems are savedfrom banality by the evident care which has gone into the

' (23) Who Mitchell's `we' selection of a particular event ... are and why the

automatic equation of the domestic with the banal? This equationis one that is made

often in reviews of women poets who deal with home and children, we shall meet it

again in reviews of Eavan Boland's poems. The critic Blake Morrison in an article

published in the same volume looking at `Young poets in the 1970s' does at least put

some namesto the feminist poets he dismisses.He accountsfor the paucity of

women poets in mainstreamworks by arguing that the women's movement of the

70s has meant that those who might in the past have published with the larger houses

and magazineshave begun to prefer the readershipof the committed few. His own

dismissal of these poets gives us some insight into why.

`... To readerswho have struggledwith the menstrual obsessionsof Penelope

Shuttle, the fire-and-brimstone of Abigail Mozley, and the banality that pervadesso much of the Women's Literature Collective's SevenWomen, this will not come as bad news; better, they would say, to stick with the `mainstream' work of such poets as Val Warner, Carol Rumens,Joan Downar and Connie Bensley.' (24)

Of the four poets he mentions hereonly Rumens is given consistentinclusion in the mainstream. PenelopeShuttle has clearly toned down her `menstrual obsessions'by the 80s as she is the only woman poet (out of eight) considered in Michael Hulse's review of the current state of English poetry. (25)

24 Things do not get much better in the 90s. In Anthony Thwaite's revised and updated

Poetry Today; A Critical Guide to British Poetry 1960-95 we seethe sameproblem with the concept of women poets. Of the 19 chaptersallotted to different combinations and groups of poets the odd woman is included in four or five of them.

In chapter 14, for example,we have Wendy Cope discussedwith Tony Harrison,

Douglas Dunn and JamesFenton as `popular' in the sensethat their books sell well by poetry standards.We then come to chapter 17 headed`Some Women'. Its positioning towards the end of the book speaksvolumes. In the opening paragraphhe

writes:

`To corral others of them together in this section is, I would agree,a convenient even a lazy ploy, rather than an intelligent critical act. And yet to do this is, in a sense,to follow a common practice, inauguratedby women, since the l970s: anthologies, even whole publishing houses,have presentedwomen as women.' He then goes on to open his next paragraphwith the words `They are, of course,individuals, however they be ' (26) may presented ...

Then why does Thwaite not presentthem as such?What is the difference between the few poets whose namesare allowed to appearat the head of chapterselsewhere and those grouped together here? His discussion in this chapter does not reveal any link or female aestheticshared by the many poets mentionedhere. As with Morrison there is the get-out of the critic only doing what women themselveshave done, namely publish together. There seemsto be no awarenessthat it is becauseof not being taken seriously by critics and reviewers like Thwaite that women have sought other publishing contexts.Thwaite does at least acknowledgethe effect, in a

25 relatively positive way, of `the feminist revolutions of the post-1960s' on women

poets and gives specific examplesin Fleur Adcock and Vicki Feaver. He also argues

for their `high profile' in the late twentieth century. One wonders where this high

profile is to be found since they certainly don't have one in his survey.

David Kennedy's survey of British poetry froml980-1994 (27), written as a

companion to The New Poetry which he co-edited, is better. Women are not

ghettoised in a single chapter although the ratio of female to male poets discussedis

similar to his poetryanthology and male poets dominate the longerand the single

anddual poetessays.

Martin Booth in his much more anti-establishmentreview of the period has the same

dilemma with the woman poet. While decrying his belief in sucha categoryhe

nonethelessgroups them together and describestheir work in patronising terms.

Freda Downie's poetry is `detailedand neat, particularly accuratein that it seeksto

explain with a certain finicky tidiness' (28). Fleur Adcock's poetry is `quiet,

sometimesdistinctly feminine' (29). Patricia Beer's work is `best describedas safe.

It takes no risks and is rooted firmly in a security that chauvinists might say is typical of women who are happy and safe in a home, a marriage and a round of life in which they know themselves.' (30) The unquestioningassumptions here are breathtaking both about Beer's life and about women's poetry. I have yet to read a critical review of a male poet whose work is explainedwholly in terms of his happy home life. And a survey of poetry produced by women in this period, establishedpoets or otherwise, suggestsquite a bit of writing exploresthe lack of safety and self-knowledge in these institutions. One or two poets, however, manageto transcendthe limiting

26 specificities of their genderand these Booth disassociatesfrom the female poet.

Stevie Smith and Sylvia Plath, for example,are describedas not necessarilyfemale

poets but just poets. Interestingly both poets are pre 1970.Plath while managingto

avoid the `neat emotions' and `feminine gentleness'associated with women's

writing `wrote from the core of the modernwoman's soul and, since so many males

also took wholeheartedly to her poetry, she did a vast amount for the female cause.'

(31)

Thesereviewers and anthologists demonstratethat to capturethe attention of male

readersand critics the woman poet has to climb out of the limitations of her gender.

With luck and experienceshe can find a way of expressingher own specific vision

while finding a metaphorwhich contains truly universal elements. Sheis then

rewarded by being divested of the shacklesof her gender and becoming `just a poet'.

The feeling that in order to write poetry a woman has to leavebehind the messy

`stretchmarks' of the body and becomeandrogynous mind is sharedby many female poets. Eavan Boland, for example, writes of the `splitting' between mind and body which had to occur for her to be a poet:

`I could give a voice to the certaintiesof my mind but not to the questionsof my body. Once I had seenmyself at that table engagedin the act of history, the work of

Now if had body the poem. I saw myself - as I steppedoutside my - shrivelled and discounted:a woman at a window engagedin a power of languagewhich rebuffed the truth of her life. ' (32)

27 This is not only the casewith what may be seenas conventional lyric poetry. The

performancepoet JeanBinta Breeze writes of the sameprejudices in dub poetry. She

writes of how many people found her poetry difficult to equatewith her gender

becauseof its radical politics. After being criticised for her sensualmovement during

her performancesshe took to wearing khaki uniforms on stageto disguiseher body

before having the confidenceto embrace its rhythmic movement as part of her

performance.(33)

Importance of magazines and small presses.

All the authors and editors of the critical works discussedabove are also poets,

editors of publishing housesand /or small poetry pressesand magazinesand as such

have considerableinfluence in their judgements. We are reminded of Bartlett's

poem again, Booth arguesthat `Movements in poetry are best viewed through

magazineswhich are more spontaneousthan collections or anthologies,all of which have received publisher's editor's restrictions of one sort or another.' (34) Certainly small magazinesand pressesare the site of emerging new poetic voices although the precariousnessof the funding for such venturesmeans that the field is often changing. Here however we seethe samepolitics of gender. Most of the editors of the poetry magazinesare men. (A notable exception here is the poetry magazine

Writing Womencontrolled by an editorial female collective.) The debateabout the exclusion of women has been conducted in someof the pagesof the magazines themselves.(35) One responseof editors to the unequalratios of male and female poets is to lament the lack of contributions from women poets and to assertthat women prefer to submit their work to feminist journals, thus effectively marginalising themselves.This is the same argumentpresented by Booth, Morrison

28 etc. above. The problem here is that there are few establishedplaces for women to

go. Unlike the North American poetry scenethere are very few `feminist journals'

which publish a high proportion of poetry. Writing Womenis the only one I know of.

There have been others which have produced some but like many small independent

magazineshave not managedto sustain publication. Non creative-writing journals

such as Spare Rib and Everywomanpublished some but this hardly addsup to a

viable alternative. This is why the feminist publishing context has been so important in getting women poets visibility.

Feminist Publishing

Alison Fell writing in the introduction to Hard Feelings askswhat relation feminism has to the act of writing: `doesits impetus free women to write exactly what they think or does its ideology place its own limitations on the areasthey feel they can uncover.' (36) It would be naive to seefeminist pressesand magazinesas homogenousand all-embracing of women writers, each has its own agendaboth in terms of its relationship to political feminism and in terms of how it negotiatesits relationship with mainstreampublishing. The difference between, for example,

Onlywomen Pressand The Women's Pressis considerablein terms of the works and writers published and their relationshipto the women's movement and mainstream publishing. Nevertheless,the establishmentof such pressesand of journals like

SpareRib were significant in providing a spacefor fiction and poetry by women which explored their experienceand reflected the insights gainedby the consciousnessraising of the 70s. The writer Alison Fell who was fiction editor of

SpareRib in the 70s comments on how few outlets there were for the `spiky, political sort of writing that feminist consciousnessproduced. Through the magazine

29 they could reach an audienceof their peersand get some support for creative writing

about female experiencewhich might never have seenthe light of day if left to the

prejudicesof the literary establishment.' (37)

Spenderprovides a historical overview of the absenceof women from publishing.

This is related to the whole issue of exclusion and silencing of women's writing

(38). In addition women's structural relationship to paid employment has meant that

there have been few resourcesavailable to women to finance publication. Although

women are employed in large numbers in the publishing industry they are positioned

at the lower end. The first feminist pressesin the U. K. therefore either had to rely

substantially on money put up by men or establishtheir independenceat greaterrisk

of financial security. Both Virago and The Women's Press,set up in the late 70s,

have mainly been financed by men. The initial arrangementsassured editorial control

but the firing of many staff (all women) by the male owner of the Women's Pressin

1991 highlighted the inequalities of such a basis.

An example of a presswhich was owned and controlled entirely by women was

Onlywomenpress. The aim of the presswas not only to providean outletfor

women's writing but also to enablewomen to take control of the print production

processitself. In an interview in Trouble and Strife magazinein 1993 founder

membersLilian Mohin, Sheila Shulmanand others talk about the development of their press. (39) The impetus came from a women's writing group which in 1972 published a pamphlet of their poemscalled Too latefor ignorance and from this group was formed the Women's Literature Collective under whose auspicesthey published a journal called Women'sLiterature Review. In 1972 they published a

30 collection of poemsby the American writer Robin Morgan and anotherpamphlet of

their own work. In order to control the production processof their publications

Mohin and otherswent to college to learn printing and book production. The press

was establishedin November 1977 and until 1984 was a printing venture in order to

resource the publishing side. One of the important things about this press was the

way it saw literature and theory as complementary.The poemsproduced by the press

were as significant politically as their earlier reprinting of classic works such as

Rich's Compulsory Heterosexuality. This is also true of the poetry publishedby

Spare Rib. Poetry was not seenas aestheticand separatefrom the politics of the

women's movement but was part of women speakingout and finding voices.

In 1979 Onlywomen press publishedwhat they regardedas `Britain's first ever

anthology of feminist poetry' - One Foot on the Mountain. (40) This included the

work of 55 poets and for a lot of them it was the first time they had been in print:

women such as Michele Roberts, Alison Fell, Sheila Rowbotham, Micheline

Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns, all of whom are now establishedwriters in different genres.

Onlywomen was important in publishing books by lesbian poets. The logo on the

back of all its early publications defined the press as `radical feminist'. Later in the

early 80s the logo changedto read `radical feminist and lesbian'. In the late 80s this changedagain to `radical feminist lesbian'. Discussing the different `feminisms' included in their first poetry anthology, Mohin writes:

`Whenwe startedwe definedourselves as both a lesbianand radical feminist collective, to describeour politics in contrastto socialist feminism. But we also saw ourselvesas part of the women's liberation movement,which to us meant all feminists, straight women as well. We didn't aim to publish work only by radical

31 feminists, or by lesbians.We were looking at the words on the page and what the

printed word was saying, and in so far as any of the women in, say, One Foot, had

socialist feminist views, they weren't expressedin the poems.' (41)

Mohin is open about her perspectiveand selection- some other anthologiesof

women's poetry published in this period are not so candid. (42) This example shows

the importance of these alternative spacesfor women writing in the 70s and the

importance of women's agencyand connectionhere. Given the construction of the

woman poet by the mainstreamindustry, suchpresses and magazineswere a crucial

spacewhere women could publish but even more importantly women could read

poetry by other women.

OneFoot on theMountain was not easilyavailable in high streetbookshops and the

need for widespreaddistribution and marketing forced the press to becomemore

commercial in the 80s. This was a decadethat saw many of the radical bookshopsof

the 70s pushedout by the big chains like Penguin and Waterstones.Mergers and takeovers in the publishing industry threatenedthe existenceof small and independentpresses. At the sametime, however, the marginalising of poetry as a genre among commercial publishersbecause of its lack of economicviability has made small presseseven more important as a site for new voices.

Why Does It Matter? I'm not a woman poet but... '

Dowson (43) arguesthat one reasonfor the pattern of the last three hundred years, where women publish and then slip from literary histories, is that they do not receive proper attention from male-dominatedliterary criticism. Women write poetry, read

32 poetry and win poetry prizes yet as long as they continue to be sidelined and

negatively stereotypedin mainstreamcriticism and within the academytheir names

are likely to disappearfrom the literary records. As with the term feminist, the term

woman poet has been so derided that many poets go out of their way to disassociate

themselvesfrom it. Anne Stevensonand SheenaghPugh are among contemporary

poets who reject completely this label. This is nothing new. In 1935Loise Bogan

wrote to John Hall Wheelock,her editor, to reportthat:

`Malcolm Cowley, a month or so ago askedme to edit an anthologyof female verse,to

be usedin the pagesof the New Republic. They have as you know, alreadypublished

groups of Middle-Westernverse, and what not. They are now about to divide mankind

horizontally rather than vertically, sexually rather than geographically. As you might

have expected,I turnedthis prettyjob down; the thought of correspondingwith a lot of

female songbirdsmade me acutely ill. It is hard enoughto bearwith my own lyric

side.' (44)

As long aswomen themselvesinternalise the stricturesagainst the woman poet the two

termswill continueto seemmutually exclusive.

Difference and Diversity. The Aesthetic of the 'Other'

Debates about whether women should publish separateanthologies have been related to debatesaround the existenceand value of a distinct female aesthetic.Much of the feminist critical work published since the 70s engageswith the construct of the woman poet to considerthis notion of a female aesthetic.Much of it considersNorth

Americaor nineteenth-centuryBritain andlocates poetry by womenas generically

33 distinct from the dominant male tradition. (45) With twentieth-century British

women's poetry there has been less of a desire to locate it within a specifically

female tradition. Jan Montefiore (46) considersboth American and British poets,

some contemporary, in relation to their `difference' from their male contemporaries

in the use of language,form and theme. Although she raisesthe questionof the

relationship between aestheticsand feminism, her analysis is inconclusive. She

argues for a distinction between `bad poetry' which is of interestto the social

historian of ideologies and poetry which is valued for its intrinsic aestheticquality

but she is vague about what this quality is. Nor does shetake up the relationship

betweentraditional notions of `aestheticvalue' and gender. Minogue (47) critiques

Monteflore and others for their limiting notion of a female aestheticset in opposition

to a male tradition and thus proscribedby it. Minogue arguesthat the notion of a

female tradition or aestheticin the work of critics such as Rich and post- Lacanian

French feminists is essentialistand, more importantly, prescriptive putting

limitations on what and how women should write. Sheis critical of the privileging of

gender and sexuality in a female aestheticbut she herself resorts to a humanist

position as if this is free of prescriptions and proscriptions. She does however look at

the importance of social and economic conditions in women's accessto writing and

publication, something which is played down in many other studies.Greer questions the value of many of the female poets resurrectedby feminist scholars.She argues that after the Elizabethan agewhich she paints as a golden age of freedom from gender and sexual stereotypeswhere femininity was adopted as masqueradeby both sexes,sexual divisions closed in restricting and disabling women writers. She sees the polarisation of sexual difference and women's lack of education as disabling to women writers. At the sametime she arguesthat a selectband of arbitrarily chosen

34 token women, all young, beautiful and virtuous, were rewarded for their failures.

(48) Greer has little time for twentieth-century poets who shecasts as neurotic

women writing bad exhibitionist verse as a rehearsalfor dying. Greer never

questionsthe standardsof literary aestheticsthat so many of the poets arejudged by

and her work ultimately adheresto traditional canonical values. Dowson (49) cites

Greer as displaying characteristicsof Gilbert and Gubar's `female affiliation

complex' where `by rubbishing women of the past, and by implication of the present

too, she shoresup her own credentialsas one of the boys, clever and worthy of an

enduring place in history.'

Dowson setsout an agendafor feminist critics which I want to associatemyself with

in the following chapters.Her agendahas three main points: `to be aware that

publishing needsto be accompaniedby due critical recognition; to conquerthe

female affiliation complex by providing positive role models; and to counter the

myths about women poets by celebratingtheir diversity but also by making connections betweenthem. ' (50) Work which adheresto this agendadoes exist but it is still relatively thin on the ground. (51)

The notion of a female aesthetichas lost currency in recent years with attacks on essentialismand the recognition that contemporarywomen's writing addresses gender but this is often through its intersection with `race,' ethnicity, class and sexuality. Debates about a black or lesbian aesthetichave been equally contentious: complex cultures are often polarised and reducedfor the sakeof assertinggroup identities. All these different aestheticshave however called into questiononce more the constitution of what is called English literature.

35 English Literature and Diversity.

The concept of `Englishness'has becomecentral over the last three decadesto a

debateabout national identity and has brought with it a challengeto acceptedideas

about the study of English literature. Literature has never been canonisedon purely

aestheticgrounds; what constitutes aestheticvalues at any given time is always

informed by political and social issues. As consensualidentification with nation

beganto shift to cultural identification with gender,region, `race' and ethnicity, the

question of value in literature or indeedwhat constitutesEnglish literature itself

becameproblematic. The notion of an objective and universal aestheticvalue was

challenged as a white culturally imperialist masculine myth. The term English

literature itself becameredefined; literatures in English is now often the preferred

term to acknowledgethe flux of texts, often from ex-colonial countries, whose

appearanceposes a challengeto so-called `metropolitan' claims to offer defining

evaluations.

In 1976 SeamusHeaney in his lecture `Englandsof the Mind' analysedthe attitudes

of three male poets, Hughes, Hill and Larkin to what he called `the senseof an

ending' which in different ways has `driven all three of these writers into a kind of

piety towards their local origins, has made them look in, rather than up, to England.'

He locates this in the changing narrativesof Britain; loss of imperial power and the diminished influence of Britain within Europe. This, he argues,is forcing poets to explore `not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England.' (52)

SeamusHeaney himself with his refusal to be included in an anthology of British

36 verse (53) showedto what extent by the mid-eighties Britishness had also becomea

contentiousnotion.

As with women's writing, separatespaces were createdfor themselvesby writers

who saw themselvesand their texts as marginal or in some way different to the so-

called centre. Thesegroups were then often taken up by the major publishersand

given a specific cultural identity. For example in the 80s Anglophone Caribbean

poetry came into vogue and a number of separatistanthologies were publishedby

major companies.(54) By the late 80s suchpoets were being representedin poetry

anthologieswith the term British in the title, even if the term was deliberately

appropriatedto show its opposition to what the mainstreamanthologies considered

British. In The New British Poetry for example we have the voices of many poets

previously only published in separatistanthologies or by small pressesand

magazines. The four editors select different strandsin contemporarypoetry in order

to avoid a central perspectiveor `a narrowly defined orthodoxy.' Fred D'Aguiar who

selectsthe black poetry seesblack identity defined `by a strong senseof being other than what is laudedas indigenous and capitally British' (55) Gillian Allnutt uneasy

about the terms feminist and feminist poetry neverthelessselects women poets whose common denominator is difference from male traditions and categories.This anthology setsitself against what it seesas the establishmentanthologies and voices, emphasisinginstead poetry from a plurality of origins and a variety of values, a new heterodoxy as opposedto an old canon. The three poets in my study were all included in this volume.

37 Grace Nicholls, cautions againstthe stereotypeof the black woman poet in her poem

`Of Course When They Ask for PoemsAbout the `Realities' of Black Women (aka

Maybe This Poem)':

What they really want

at times

is a specimen

whose heart is in the dust

A mother-of-sufferer trampled, oppressed they want a little black blood undressed

andvalidation

for the abusedstereotype already in their heads

Or else they want a perfect song

I say I can write no poem big enough to hold the essence

of a black woman

or a white woman

or a greenwoman

38 And there are black women

and black women like a contrasting sky of rainbow spectrum ...

Maybe is to ... this poem say, that I like to see we black women full-of-we-selves walking

Crushingout

with eachdancing step

thetwisted self-negating history we've inherited

Crushing out

with eachdancing step. (56)

What Nicholls' poem insists upon is the diversity of the black woman and hencethe black woman poet. Black poetry is not restricted to one place or one language.It can include African writing in English, French, Portugueseor a specifically African language,Caribbean writing, Asian writing in English or a number of Asian languagesand literature by non-white writers who would not accept any of these labels. To seeblack only in relation to white is to perpetuatea racist binary which

39 doesn'trecognise the specificityof white literatureor the white subject.Such

anthologieshave beenimportant, however, in the politics of publication, political

solidarity and creating support networks and greater visibility as a group.

In the 90s more attention was given to the heterogeneityof black culture but the

poetry world has been slow in embracing this diversity. Music and film have offered

analysis of what Hall refers to as `new ethnicities' (57) but the poetry world has

offered little in analysis of this phenomenon.Anthologies have played and continue to play an active role in constructing national consciousness.Korte (58) discussesthe marketing of Ricks' 1999 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verseas a cultural text. Its releasedeliberately coincided with National Poetry Day, 7 October1999and it was marketed as prestigious cultural capital. `Stoutly bound in blue and gold, and

facsimile wrapped in a parchment -thick jacket adornedwith quill pens, the of a

Shakespeariansonnet, and what looks like National Trust wallpaper, this is scolarship as heritage object, marketed with one eye on the academybut the other on mail order book clubs.' Indeed Ricks, himself, discusseswhat is `English and

British' in the preface to explain why his book includes small amounts of Irish,

Welsh and Scottish poetry- and a little early American poetry-as English, while excluding poetrieswritten in English elsewhere.(59)

Crawford in an analysis of the relationship between anthologiesand nations argues for a recognition of the many languagesthat have made up Britain and Ireland-

Gaelic, Welsh, Scots and varieties of English. Although this has began to be addressedwith some recent anthologies,as he argues: `There remains a casefor national anthologieswhich complicate as well as reinforce the collectings of a

40 community that views itself as a nation, be that community Scotland,Australia or

England.' (60) However such anthologiesneed to recognisethe often very different

relationship to nation or community inhabited by women writers.

Women and Nation.

Nation is never simply the now of political and geographical spacebut always a

concept with its own narrative history. As Benedict Andersonstates, the imaginary

spacein which nations exist may be very different from actual physical space.(61)

National identities are formed through historical processesand the storieswe tell ourselvesabout nations. The relationship of women to these narratives is a complex one which has received little attention in the burgeoningliterature on nation. As

Loomba argues:`If the nation is an imagined community, that imagining is profoundly gendered.' (62) Despite the attention given to theories of nation in recent years, women have been excluded from the theoriesor subsumedas a site of discourse.Feminist and cultural theorists have beganto addressthis gap looking at the specific effects of how women have beenconstructed in relation to national identity. (63) Although women have always been involved as activists in the organisedmanifestations of nationalist movements, it is in their gender specific roles as nurturers of the nation that they appearin most nationalist discourses.Thus women may be assignedresponsibility for reproducingbiologically the next generation of nationalists or for culturally reproducingcharacteristics of the nation, such as language,custom and religion. The mother's nationality may be used to determine and legitimate national citizenship or women may be given symbolic status as mothers of the nation. The nation state or its guiding principles are often literally Mother Ireland embodiedas a woman -Britannia, Mother India or -such

41 figures can be allegories,abstractions, goddesses or real life women. (64) This

identification of women as national mothers stemsfrom a wider associationof nation

with family in both colonial and anti-colonial discourse. The family is often used as

a metaphorfor the nation and as an institution is cast as the antithesisof the nation.

As Gilroy writes:

`Gender differences becomeextremely important in nation-building activity because

they are a sign of an irresistablenatural hierarchy at the centre of civic life. The

unholy forces of nationalist bio-politics intersect on the bodies of women charged

with the reproduction of absoluteethnic difference and the continuanceof the blood

line. The integrity of the nation becomesthe integrity of its masculinity.' (65)

The family becomesthe main site for this practise. Ideal motherhoodor wifehood is

also constructedby purging the ghostsof racial or classothers and in the effort to harnesswomen to the nation certain traditions are repressed.Women in any real sensedisappear from nationalist discourse.This is the central concernof Eavan

Boland's work addressedin Chapter2. If women have been the sites rather than the subjectsof historical debate, how does a woman poet enter this tradition without replicatingthe genderedpolitics andpoetics?

In practisefeminism and nationalism have interacted and conflicted in different ways. Nationalist agendashave often opened a theoretical spacefor questioning women's position and attackedprevailing religious and political doctrines which legitimated subordination.However the two are more commonly in conflict; a feminist agendais often delayed until nationalism is achieved or subsumedinto

42 narrowly defined spheres.The justification for this is the frequently observedstance

that women's oppressionis primarily the result of the subordinationof the nation.

Ward, (66) for example,looks at Irish republican ideology where the subjugation of

Irish women is presentedas a direct result of the foreign conquest of Gaelic Ireland.

Ward writes of how feminists within the Irish nationalist movementfaced a conflict

of which one to prioritise. Davies (67) notes how Welsh nationalist ideology has

made much of the betterment of women under the medieval laws of Hywel Dda.

Theoriesof nationalismhave not receivedthe sameattention from feministsas other

conceptssuch as class, `race' or sexuality. This may be to do with the way in which

different nationalisms have constructedwomen or the associationsof national

identity with neonationalist politics. In recent years attention has beganto focus on

women's relationship to the conceptsof home and space(68) and while not

dispensingwith the idea of nation, I have found these kinds of analysis fruitful in my

discussion of my chosenpoets. In this I follow Edward Said who states:`Patriotism

is best thought of as an obscuredead language, learned prehistorically but almost

forgotten and Thinking home is I'll almost unusedsince ... affectionately about all go along with. ' (69)

While the literature of Britain in the last couple of decadeshas becomeless homogenous,this diversity seemsto be particularly marked in poetry. Why is this?

Bell arguesthat in poetry, the persistenceof small-scalelocal publishing and the co- existenceof strong independentregional traditions has allowed for multivocality and a proper attention to the heteroglot constituentsof Britain. He arguesit is easier to find suchvoices in poetry than in the novel which `often reproducesthe hegemonic

43 gaze' (70) If this is true for poetry generally, it seemseven truer for women poets.

Many poets who inhabit the women's poetry anthologiesare not unequivocally

British. A cursory glance at the poets whose namesare appearingin anthologies,

both mixed and separate,show an interesting cultural diversity. Fleur Adcock was

born in New Zealand and emigrated to Britain when shewas nineteen.Moniza Alvi

was born in Pakistan,but now lives in the U. K. Nuala Archer was born in New York

of Irish parentsand has lived in Ireland and North, South and Central America.

Leland Bardwell was born in India, grew up in Leixlip, Co. Kildare and travelled

widely living in both London and Paris in the 40s and 50s. Shenow lives in Co.

Sligo. SujataBhatt was born in Ahmedabad,India but was educatedin the U. S.A.

She now lives in Germany. Jean `Binta' Breeze was born in Jamaicaand divides her

time between London and the Caribbean.Jeni Couzyn was born and grew up in

South Africa. Nuala Ni Dhomnaill was born in Lancashire, grew up in West Kerry

and lives in Dublin. Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran and educatedin Britain and

Switzerland. Eva Salzmanwas born in New York and grew up in Brooklyn moving to England when she was 25. Of the sixty women poets in France's collection over one third were not born in England. Of those who were several have parentswho are not English such as Michele Roberts or Anne Stevensonand many more have lived for long periods of time in other countries. A similar pattern emergesin other recent anthologies.

The writers I discuss in the following chapterscould all be said to write poetry which is subversiveof simplistic truths and binary positions. They all write about `home' as women, displaying different styles and preoccupationsas well as similarities. Their relationship to the country they inhabit is a genderedone but in their preoccupations

44 and their positioning of themselves,they avoid the polarities seenin recent identity

politics where on the one hand we have identity as essentialand unchanging, fixed

and determined by primordial forces, outside history and culture, or the opposite

tendency, often associatedwith post-modernism,to seeindividual identity as

`infinitely malleable, constantlyreconstructed through the ebb and flow of

consumerismand the `play' of commodities.' (71) Yet this too has beenconstrued as

a female position by critics such as Edna Longley who seesthe ability to inhabit a

rangeof relations rather than a single allegianceas female. (72) While I would

regard sucha construction as part of a myth of femininity rather than a biological

given, it is a position which is common to the poets consideredhere. In the

following chaptersthen I will consider the different ways in which these three

female poets through inhabiting a `range of relations' explore new ways of

occupying the spacesthey call `home'.

Notes

1. Elizabeth Bartlett, `StretchMarks', The Czar is Dead (London: Rivelin

Grapheme, 1986).

2. A number of anthologiesof women's poetry were produced during this period.

The following representa sampleof different types. Fleur Adcock, The Faber Book of 20th Century Women'sPoetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1987); Jeni Couzyn,

(ed) The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary WomenPoets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe

Books, 1985); Linda France,(ed. ) Sixty WomenPoets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books,

1993); RosemaryPalmeira, (ed.) In the Gold of the Flesh (London: The Women's

Press, 1990); Illona Linthwaite, Al,. 't Ia Woman!Poems by Black and White Women

(London: Virago, 1987); Christian McEwan (ed.) Naming the Waves:Contemporary

45 Lesbian Poetry (London: Virago, 1988); Carol Rumens,(ed. ) Makingfor the Open

(London: Chatto, 1985);Carol Rumens (ed.) New WomenPoets (Newcastle:

Bloodaxe Books, 1990);Melanie Silgardo and Janet Deck, (eds.) New Virago Poets

(London: Virago, 1994).

3. Michael Schmidt, (ed.) Ten English Poets (Manchester:Carcanet, 1976).

4. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, (eds.) The Penguin Book of Contemporary

British Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

5. Seefor example the commentsof Anne Stevensonin `Somenotes on women and tradition' in PNReview, 19,87 (1992), pp.29-32.

6. Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley, (eds.) The New Poetry

(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993).

7. Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford, (eds.) The Penguin Book of Poetryfrom

Britain and Ireland (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1998).

8. SeanO'Brien, The Fire Box. Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (London:

Picador, 1998).

9. Michael Schmidt, TheHarvill Book of Twentieth-CenturyPoetry in English

(London: Harvill Press, 1999),p. xxv.

10. Christopher Ricks, Oxford Book of English Verse(Oxford: O. U. P., 1999).

11. Helen Gardner, The New Oxford Book of English Verse(Oxford: O.U. P., 1972).

12. Paul Keegan, The New Penguin Book of English Verse(Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 2000).

13. Helen Dunmore, The ObserverNov. 12,2000.

14. SeamusHeaney and Ted Hughes, The School Bag (London: Faber and

Faber,1997)

15. Linda France,(ed. ) Sixty WomenPoets (Newcastle:Bloodaxe, 1993).

46 16. Christine Fitton's analysis is cited in Lizbeth Goodman, (ed.) Literature and

Gender (London: Routledge, 1996), p.47.

17. There are a number of criticisms madeof anthologies.See for exampleLaura

Riding and Robert Graves,A Pamphlet against Anthologies (London: Cape, 1928);

BarbaraBenedict, Making the Modem Reader (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1996) and TeresaKynell, `Negotiating Gapsin ReaderAnthologies. The Role

of Context in Selectionsby Women', Reader 30 (1993) pp. 65-74.

18. Tony Lacey, `The Anthology Problem A Publisher's View', in Barbara Korte et

al. (eds.), Anthologies of British Poetry, Critical Perspectivesfrom Literary and

Cultural Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000) pp.333-342.

19. Ibid.

20. Griff Rhys-Jones,The Nation's Favourite Poems(London: BBC, 1996).

21. Ian Hamilton, The Oxford Companion to twentiethcentury poetry in English

(Oxford: O. U. P., 1994).

22. Peter Jonesand Michael Schmidt, (eds.), British Poetry since 1970 (Manchester:

Carcanet, 1980).

23. DeborahMitchell, `Modes of Realism: Roy Fisher and Elaine Feinstein' in Jones and Schmidt, British Poetry since 1970 p. 128

24. Blake Morrison, `Young Poets in the 70s' in Jones and Schmidt, British Poetry since 1970. p. 146.

25. Michael Hulse, `Disbelief, Idols, and Four-Letter Words' in Antigonish Review,

71-72, (1987-88) pp. 211-27.

26. Anthony Thwaite, Poetry Today.A Critical Guide to British Poetry, 1960-95

(London: Longman, 1996).

27. David Kennedy, New Relations (Bridgend: Seren, 1996).

47 28. Martin Booth, British Poetry 1964-84.Driving through the Barricades (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 163.

29. ibid., p. 130

30. ibid., p. 190

31. ibid., p. 190

32. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons(London: Vintage, 1996),p. 114.

33. JeanBinta Breeze, `Can a Dub Poet be a Woman' in Alison Donnell and Sarah

Lawson Welsh, (eds.) The RoutledgeReader in Caribbean Literature (London:

Routledge, 1996), pp. 498-500.

34. Booth, British Poetry 1964-84.Driving through the Barricades.

35. For a discussionof this debatein relation to Stand seeVicki Bertram,Muscling

In Unpublished Thesis, University of York, 1992,pp. 42-45.

36. Alison Fell, Hard FeelingsFiction andPoetry from SpareRib (London:The

Women'sPress, 1979), p. 6.

37. ibid., p.3.

38. Dale Spender,Man Made Language (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1980)

39. Cath Jackson,`A Pressof One's Own' Trouble and Strife, 26 (1993).

40. One Foot on the Mountain (London: Onlywomen Press, 1979)

41. Lilian Mohin interviewedby CathJackson, `A Pressof One'sOwn'

42. Seefor example Carol Rumens,(ed. ), Making for the Open: Postfeminist Poetry

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1987).

43. JaneDowson, `Older Sisters Are Very Sobering Things' in Feminist Review, 62,

(1999), pp.6-20.

44. SandraGilbert and SusanGubar, No Man's Land (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1988).

48 45. For example, SuzanneJuhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms (New York: Harper and

Row, 1976);Margaret Homans, WomenWriters and Poetic Identity (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1980); SandraGilbert and SusanGubar, (eds.)

Shakespeare'sSisters: Feminist Essayson WomenPoets (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press,1979); Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language (London: The

Woman's Press, 1986);Liz Yorke, Impertinent Voices(London: Routledge, 1992).

46. Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry (London: Pandora, 1987).

47. Sally Minogue, `Prescriptionsand Proscriptions:Feminist Criticisms and

Contemporary Poetry' in Problemsfor Feminist Criticism (London: Routledge,

1990), pp. 179-236.

48. GermaineGreer, Slip-shod Sibyls (Harmondsworth: Viking Press, 1995).

49. JaneDowson, `Older Sistersare Very SoberingThings' p.7

50. ibid., p.7

51. See for example Vicki Bertram (ed.) Kicking Daffodils (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 1998).

52. SeamusHeaney, `Englandsof the Mind' in Dennis Walder, (ed.), Literature in

the Modern world (Oxford: O.U. P., 1991), p.257.

53. SeamusHeaney, `OpenLetter' in Ireland's Field Day (London: Hutchison,

1985) pp 23-30.

54. For example,Paula Burnett (ed.), The Penguin book of Caribbean verse

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); JamesBerry (ed.), Newsfor Babylon (Chatto,

1984);E. A. Markham (ed.), Hinterland: Caribbeanpoetryfrom the WestIndies and

Britain (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989); Stewart Brown et al (eds.), Voiceprint: an anthology of oral and related poetry (London: Longman, 1989).

55. Gillian Allnutt et al, The New British Poetry (London: Paladin, 1988).

49 56. Grace Nicholls, `Of CourseWhen They Ask for PoemsAbout the `Realities' of

Black Women (aka Maybe This Poem),' Lazy Thoughtsof a Lazy Woman(London:

Virago, 1984).

57. Stuart Hall `New Ethnicities.' in A. Rattansiand J. Donald (eds.) `Race; Culture

and D Terence (London: Sage, 1992),pp. 252-259.

58. BarbaraKorte, `Flowersfor the Picking' in Korte,(ed. ) Anthologiesof British

Poetry,Critical Perspectivesfrom Literary and CulturalStudies p 1-32.

59. Christopher Ricks, Oxford Book of English Verse(Oxford: O.U. P, 1999),

Preface.

60. Robert Crawford, `Poetry, Memory and Nation. ' in Korte, (ed.) Anthologies of

British Poetry, Critical Perspectivesfrom Literary and Cultural Studies

61. Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998).

62. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, (London: Routledge, 1998), p.215.

Seefor 63. example the work of Lata Mani, Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval -Davies and Sabina Sharkey.

64. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism. p.215.

65. Paul Gilroy, `Diasporasand the Detours of Identity' in Kathryn Woodward, (ed.)

Identity and Difference (London: Sage, 1997), p. 333.

66. Margaret Ward, UnmanageableRevolutionaries: Womanand Irish Nationalism

(London: Pluto Press, 1983).

67. Charlotte Aull Davies, `Nationalism: Discourse and Practice' in Nicki Charles and Felicia Hughes-Freeland,(eds. ), Practising Feminism (London: Routledge,

1996).

50 68. Seefor exampleDoreen Massey, Space,Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity,

1994).

69. Edward Saidcited in RosemaryMarangoly George, The Politics of Home

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 201.

70. Ian Bell, Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in ContemporaryBritish

Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995).

71. Gilroy, `Diasporasand the Detours of Identity' in Woodward, p.313.

72. Edna Longley, `From Cathleento Anorexia' in The Living Stream (Newcastle:

Bloodaxe, 1994), p. 195.

51 Chapter 2.

`The contrary passion to be whole': The Poetry of Eavan Boland.

"`For, " the outsider will say, "in fact as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I

want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. "' (1) In Three

Guineas Virginia Woolf challengesthe whole structure of a masculine establishment

which has appropriated the identity of the nation, and proposesthat women should

form an `Outsiders' society which takes the whole world as its country. For the Irish

poet Eavan Boland, writing more than fifty years later, the feelings of exclusion are

equally strong; like Woolf she seesherself as an outsider in her own national

literature but rather than reject her nation she setsout to repossessit. The feeling that

as a woman she has no country drives her to forge a relationship with nation and tradition. Much of Boland's poetry is about this `dialogue' with the idea of a nation

and a national poetic tradition.

In what could almostbe a responseto Woolf shesets out herreasons for not rejectingthe ideaof a nation:

`A womanpoet is rarelyregarded as an automaticpart of a nationalpoetic tradition Sheis deeply into intimate ... too woven the passivetexture of thattradition, too a part of its imagery,to be allowedher freedom.She may know,as an artist,that sheis nowthe makerof the poemsand not merelythe subjectof them.The critiqueis slow to catchup. ' (2)

52 Yet the marginality of the woman poet, she also seesas conferring certain

advantagesin particular an awarenessof the real power of subversion.Boland is

critical of the tendency towards locating women's poetry as a separatesubculture

and feels if the woman poet is not to remain marginalised, it is vital to engagein a

dialogue with the idea of nation. The dilemma for the woman poet which Boland

delineatesin her essayis how to locate herself within a powerful literary tradition in

which until very recently she had been an object rather than an agent of change.

Boland does not want to eschewthe Irish tradition she has inherited but to

`repossess'it and edit in the realities of women's lives. Insteadof Dark Rosaleen,

CathleenNi Houlihan, the Old Woman of the Roads, passiveprojections of a

national idea, shewants living and breathing and complex women.

In this essayBoland refers to an encounter she had while a young studentat Trinity

which is the subject of her poem `The Achill Woman' from her 1990 collection

Outside History. It seemsto me one of her most important poemsin exploring

poetry, nationhood and womanhood. The genesisof the poem was a chance

encounterBoland had some years earlier while a studentat Trinity. Boland borrowed

a cottagein Achill to revise and met there an old woman who as caretakerto the

cottage carried up water for Boland every evening. She talked to Boland about the

Irish Famine and its effects on that areaand later Boland writes of the power of that

encounter:

`Memory is treacherous.It confers meaningswhich are not apparentat the time. I want to saythat I understoodthis woman as emblem and instance of everything I am

53 about to propose.Of courseI did not. Yet even then I senseda power in the

encounter. I knew without having words for it, that she came from a past which

affected me. When shepointed out Keel to me that eveningwhen the wind was brisk

and cold and the light was going, when she gesturedtowards that shorewhich had

stonesas outlines and monumentsof a desperatepeople, what was she pointing at? A

history? A nation? Her memoriesor mine?

Those questions,once I beganto write my own poetry came back to haunt me.' (OL,

125)

Boland is the Irish intellectual living in Dublin but `weekending' in the Achill

cottage: `with one suitcaseand the set text / of the Court poets of the Silver Age' (3) who connectson some level with this participant in a past which is also Boland's yet whose experienceis outside the texts Boland receives in her education at Trinity.

The poem shows up the gaps and the irony of Boland's own situation there; part of the establishmentyet somehowconnected to this woman:

but nothing now can change the way I went indoors, chilled by the wind andmade a fire and took down my book and failed to comprehend

the harmoniesof servitude, the grace music gives to flattery

54 and languageborrows from ambition-

The poetry of those court poets is implicated in this woman's pain and erasedloss.

Homi Bhabha describesthe `emblem of the English book' as one of the `signstaken

for wonders' by which the aspirationsof the colonised are contained. (4) The text

assumesa greater authority than the colonised peoplesthemselves. When the `raw'

Boland turns away from the woman and back to her `settext' she unconsciously

aligns herself with a literature which was part of a power structurethat oppressed

women and helped to defeat the Irish nation. The experiencesrecounted by the

Achill woman are not ones acknowledgedby the tradition Boland is being schooled in and of which she will becomea part. The poem showsup the gap between

`history' and the past, a gap which Boland becomesincreasingly concernedwith in her poetry. The story the Achill woman tells is not one of the official written narratives and she thus becomesrepresentative of this spacebetween `history' and the past. This spaceis often linked in Boland's poetry to a female oral tradition which has beenerased and which she explores in such poemsas `What we Lost. '

(OH, 43)

The Achill woman then representsa silence in the Irish poetic tradition. These silences,what they come to mean to Boland as a poet and how to articulate them is the central concernof Boland's poetry. The difficulty Boland has here is how to representthe Achill woman ethically without turning her into another literary device.

The poetic authority she is heir to is one in which flesh and blood women are transmutedinto `fictive queens' and `national sybils.' (OL, 135) Critics such as Edna

Longley argue that she fails to do this. The `real women of an actual past' she

55 accuses,`are subsumedinto a single emblematicvictim figure, ' one that in

Longley's view looks remarkably similar to the SeanBhean Bhocht or poor old

woman of Irish myth. (5) Certainly the Achill woman is not individualised here.

Differences of class and material position are conveniently ignored in both the poem

and the text. More perceptively, however, taking account of the poem's positioning

as the first of a sequence,Weekes asserts:`The silence of women of the past in

history is an "aspect" of their truth, and the silenceof the Achill woman is the truth

of the young "gesturing" poet's response:to presumeto break this silence is an

insult. ' (6) The Achill woman is not there in the poem as a named subject, a flesh

and blood woman, but that is the whole point. If we take the text of the poem as the poem itself and Boland's commentary on it we can seethis: `When I met the Achill woman, I was alreadya poet, I thought of myself as a poet. Yet nothing that I understoodabout poetry enabled me to understandher better. Quite the reverse

'(OL, 130) ...

The poem is less about the Achill woman and more about Boland herself and the poetic tradition of which she is a part. The sequenceof pronouns in the poem stresses this. There is a shift from the `She' of the first few lines through a `we' to the focus on `I' in the last sixteen lines of the poem. The poem is about encounters:between

Boland and the unnamed woman certainly, between an English poetics of the centre and a representativefrom the margins, betweena powerful literary tradition and an oral tradition whose `frail connectionshave beenmade and are broken.' (OH, 43)

The poem is also about an encounter betweenEast and West. The setting of the poem in Achill is significant. Although the dichotomy betweenNorth and South in

Irish writing is the one that capturesthe contemporaryimagination, there is another

56 duality of place in Irish writing, that betweentown and country, betweenDublin and

the West of Ireland. In Irish literature the West of Ireland has always been

associatedwith the original Gaelic civilisation. After the Irish renaissancelife in the

West representedfor many writers a lost Irish identity, a national psyche destroyed

by imperialism which was being rediscoveredas part of a consciouseffort for

Ireland to define itself and justify the claim to Irish independance.Set againstthe

West is the East and in particular Dublin which was seenas the gateway for English

imperialism. So Dublin has come to representmodernity and `foreign culture' as

against the indigenous culture of the West of Ireland. The young Boland visiting

from Dublin with her `set text' is part of this process.The women, then, can be seen to be representativesof two places,physically and psychically. The most important

here, encounter however, is betweenthe older Boland and her younger self - between two stagesin the poet'ssubjectivity. Boland's dialogue with the idea of a nation positions herself as a subject of her poetry, her experienceas a poet is part of her sourcematerial. In the poem she is the young protege not yet aware of the coststo her of this apprenticeship,the denial of aspectsof her past, and in the prose commentary she is the older and wiser poet revisiting and encounteringstages in her poetic subjectivity. Boland situates her younger self as an apprenticeto an exclusionary aestheticone that simplifies and falsifies the past through the power of its language.

Suchaesthetics she implies are seductive and did indeed seducethe young apprentice poet. Boland's early successwas as a formal lyric poet well schooledin the aestheticsof the 1960spoetry establishmentsof both Ireland and England. Boland's aesthetichere fitted well with the times and Irish poets of the 60s suchas Derek

57 Mahon and Brendan Kennelly, poets like Boland influenced by Yeats and Kavanagh.

She herself looking back on this early writing period sumsup her aestheticas `an

inherited mixture of the British Movement poem - overtonesof Larkin, with postures

of irony - and the Irish lyric, with posturesof mood and melancholy.' (7) What

concernsBoland the experiencedand establishedpoet is, however, the ethics of

those aesthetics:`Who the poet is, what he or she nominatesas a proper theme for

poetry, what selvespoets discover and confirm through this subject matter - all of

this involves an ethical choice. The more volatile the material - and a wounded

history,public or private,is alwaysvolatile - the moreintensely ethical the choice.' (OL, 127)

A Wounded History: Ireland's Post-colonial Status.

This wounded history is at the centre of the poetic tradition that Boland setsout to repossess.Kinsella (8) arguesthat the Irish tradition has always presentedan intimate fusion of literature and history. And in order to understandthe weight of

Irish tradition which Boland engageswith we needto locate Ireland in its history as a post-colonial country. In `The Mother Tongue' Boland writes:

I wasborn on this sideof the Pale.

I speakwith the forked tongue of colony. (9)

The `pale' hererefers to the fencewhich separatesthe Protestantarea of Dublin from the Catholicland which was seenas wild, savageand other giving its nameto the metaphor`beyond the pale.' Despitethis damningmetaphor it is often difficult to locateIreland in post-colonialtheory and particularly in literaryand feminist theory.

58 For example in feminist texts there is often a chapter on black writing or on third

world writing but white `European' nations who have beencolonised by the British

somehowdon't fit. Mac an Ghail (10) refers to the `over-racialisation' of Asians and

Afro-Caribbeans and the correlating `de-racialisation' of white minority ethnic

groups in recent academicwriting. He is specifically concernedwith the erasureof

from the Irish - as the largest labour migrant and ethnic minority group in Britain -

the academicand political map of racism and ethnicity. Indeed some commentators

have refuted the reality of Ireland as a post-colonial country. Suchaccounts have as their dominant conceptualmodel the processof assimilation in which whiteness,

Europeanness,Christianity and belonging to the British isles are all seenas marks of samenessand identification betweenIrish and English. Sharkey (11) and others, however, show how the racialisation of the Irish as a subordinategroup exists in discoursefrom the medieval period on and Loomba (12) demonstrateshow the model of the Irish `provided a model for slavery and colonialist discoursein Africa and India. ' Indeed Beddoes' 1885 `Index of Nigrescence' showedthe peoplesof

Wales, Scotland and Ireland and Cornwall as racially separatefrom the British. More specifically he arguedthat those from Western Ireland and Wales were `Africanoid' in their `jutting jaws' and `long slitty nostrils' and thus originally immigrants of

Africa. (13) Anthias and Yuval-Davis argue that all Celts and especially the Irish

Celts have been consideredan inferior often dangerous`other' in British history.

They refer to the terrible conditions of life documentedfor the exiled prisoners, mainly Irish, who were sent to the CaribbeanIslands as slavesbefore a large number of Afro-Caribbeans were brought there. (14)

59 Many Irish writers writing in English explore the legacy of such imperialism. The

reconciliation between a native Irish identity and a coloniser's tongue has been a

subject throughout 20th century Irish writing, both literary and critical. We can see

this in Joyce, Heaney and most recently in the works of Friel and other writers

associatedwith the Field Day group. It is a concernof Boland's also. In her poem

`Mise Eire' (15) the emigrant woman says `a new language/is a kind of scar/ and

healsafter a while/ into a passableimitation/ of what went before.' Here Boland

echoesJoyce's StephenDaedalus in the `tundish' scenein A Portrait of the Artist as

a YoungMan when he saysabout the English dean of studies:

`The languagein which we are speakingis his before it is mine. How different are

the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speakor write these words without unrest of spirit. His language,so familiar and so foreign, will

always be for me an acquired speech.I have not madeor acceptedits words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.' (16)

For Boland, however, the languageis doubly `his.' As a woman she is not subject in the Irish tradition. She is not only colonised by the English but by a nationalist Irish tradition also. It is significant that the woman emigrant in Wise Eire' `won't go back to it'. She sees:'my nation displaced/intoold dactyls'. In the nationalist poetic tradition Irish women have also beencolonised, not least by exclusion and simplification, and denied agencythrough serving as nationalised feminine images.

Loomba and others have shown how gender and sexuality are central to the conceptualisationand enactmentof colonial relations (17) and how a history of

60 colonisation can be seenas a history of feminisation. Elfmann in her study of the

metaphoric relationship betweenwriting and hunger provides a recent example in the

context of the Irish hunger strikes of 1981. When Cardinal O'Fiaich appealedto

Margaret Thatcher for a solution to the crisis she replied, `Will someoneplease tell

me why they are on hunger strike? I have askedso many people. Is it to prove their

virility? ' As Ellmann argues,Thatcher here `equatesthe colonial with the

emasculate,figuring political impotence as sexual unmanliness.' (18) Sucha process

of emasculationhas resultedin colonised people, often long after colonisation has

ended, tending to observeor impose strictly differentiated genderroles in order to

assertthe masculinity and right to power of the (male) subjects.

Irish nationalistshave varied in their attitudes to female agency.Ward (19) shows

how the interpellation of nationalist women hasdiffered at different stagesin 20th

century Irish history but neverthelessthe dominant metaphor for the nation in 20th

century Irish writing remainsthe woman. The interconnection of gender and national

identity then is complex for Irish women becauseof their inheritance of a `liberation'

discoursewhich has utilised essentialistnational metaphors of the feminine. What

Corkery refers to as the `Aisling convention' has always beenpart of the bardic

tradition but it took on a new force with nationalism and revivalism. (20) Although

the national liberation struggle in Ireland has privileged literature and particularly

poetry as a meansof reconstructinga national identity, women have been the objects rather than the subjectsof suchwriting and as such have beenreduced to a handful of stereotypes,usually a variant on the virgin raped by the colonising British and in need of a manly protector and the grieving mother translating pity into a call to arms

61 andvengeance. We cansee the legacyof this in poetslike SeamusHeaney. The

following lines arefrom Act of Union:

And I am still imperially

Male, leaving you with the pain,

The rending processin the colony,

The battering ram, the boom burst from within.

No ... treaty I foreseewill salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarkedbody, the big pain

That leavesyou raw, like openedground, again (21)

The construct of the body of woman as geographicalterritory has a long history in both colonial and nationalist discourse.In `Ireland and the Iconography of Rape'

Sharkeylooks at how the two stagesof colonialism which sheterms dominant and hegemonic used the languageof rape and husbandry- fortunate fall and act of union

- to possessterritory and rewrite the map. Where the body of the territory and the body of the colonial site was genderedfemale, the counter hegemonyof nineteenth century Irish Nationalists fashionedthe male hero as one who liberated the abducted female through repossession.Male identity positions altered in simple and superficially effective ways, the colonial male was now representedas the abuser and the native endeavourdeemed chivalric. (22) What remainsconstant however is the stasisof the identity positions given to the female.

62 Padraig Pearse'sfamous Wise Eire' is a classic example of the genrepopularised by

the celtic revival (23) and is satirised by Boland in her own poem of the sametitle

discussedabove. In Irish legend `Miss Eire' was the normal responseof the beautiful

maidensof the 18th and 19th century `Aisling' poemson being questionedabout

their identity. After a seriesof questionshad beenput to them by a male poet suchas

`Are you Venus or Aphrodite?' the maidenwould reply; `I am Ireland and I am sick

since I have no true and manly husband.' The men in Ireland had been feminised by

colonialism. The function of this general and idealisedAisling figure is to remind the

men that they must repossessher homeland and make her well by fighting the

English for her. In Boland's `Mise Eire' she explores the legacy of this dual

colonisation, the alienation she feels towards the languageas an Irish woman.

Boland replacesthe Aisling figure with the history of a single emigrant woman:

Iamthewoma.n - a sloven'smix of silk at the wrists, a sort of dove-strut in the precincts of the garrison -

who practises the quick frictions, the rictus of delight and gets cambric for it, rice-coloured silks. (SP, 71)

63 Pearse'srefrain of `I am Ireland' becomesin Boland's poem `I am the Woman.' The

idealised myth is countered with the reality of women'slives in colonial and post-

colonial Ireland-emigration and prostitution. Insteadof `the songs/ that bandageup

the history' and `the words / that make a rhythm of the crime' Boland presentsa

narrative of loss where the personais disillusioned with the country she left behind.

Insteadof the traditional depiction of a pure Irish maiden we have a prostitute who is

bought by British soldiers. Insteadof mother Ireland we have a mother `holding her

half-dead baby to her/ as the wind shifts East/ and North over the dirty/ water of the wharf. ' The style here is deliberately discomforting: the Irish title `Mise Eire' is followed immediately by the words in English: `I won't go back to it -' an assertion of rootednessis followed by a narrative of estrangement.What Boland seeksis `a new language...' one which recognisesthe whole past and is able to move on, one which doesn't constructthe past in `A palsy of regrets.' Yet she recognisesthe loss in this, the compromise that such a languageis `a kind of scar.' She knows the seductionsof the traditional emblems and images,the songsof Tom Moore which she had heard her father playing on the piano in their house in London, (OL, 49) the simulacra set out in her poem `Imago' from The Lost Land:

My ruthlessimages. My simulacra.

Anti-art: a foul skill traded by history to showa colony

the way to make pain a souvenir. (LL, 18)

64 In `Mise Eire' Boland does not reject the metaphorical relationship between Ireland

and womanhood but subvertsit. By challenging the stereotypesand myths of

womanhood, she automatically calls into question the Ireland of poetic tradition.

Longley arguesthat the characterisationof Irish nationalism as archetypically female

servesto give it a mythic pedigree, the Goddessculture rapedby the new male cult

whose `founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson,'

and exoneratesit from aggressiveand oppressiveintent. (24) Such a metaphoric

relation also implies particularly in the trope of the pure and passivevirgin ruined by

the English a pre-colonial state of grace - an idyllic pure authentic nation or origin.

The evidenceis not strong for this ideal certainly in literary terms. Crawford (25)

and Jeffares(26) arguethat there is no suchthing as a pure literary national genre

and demonstratehow the traditions of the bardic poem have always been influenced

by other cultures prior to the influence of the Anglo-Irish tradition associatedwith

the decline of the bardic order. The idea of the `Irish poem' however has exerted an

influence perhapsmore significant than its actuality.

The Idea of the Irish Poem.

Although Boland wants to locate herself within an Irish tradition, to `repossessthe

nation' she is aware of the dangersof this construct of the Irish poem. In her essay

`Outside History' she writes about the seductionsof the Irish literary orthodoxy to

sootheambivalences but usesmale poets to show up how relentlessthe idea of

Irishnesshas been in Irish poetry. As an illustrative example of the dangersto the

poet andthe poem of this, she writes about the poetry of PadraicColum and Francis

Ledwidge. Colum had been used by the Irish literary revival and in particular Yeats to representa construct of a `peasantpoet, ' to acquiescein what Boland refers to as

65 the `supply and demand' of the Irish Revival. In Boland's view this destroyedthe

poet's potential. Like the symbolic feminine Colum had been reducedto an emblem

in all the poems about land and tenantry and could not make the transition from

being the object of the Irish poem to being its subject. `He wrote Irish poetry as if he were still the object of it. ' (OL, 140)

As a model for how to avoid this, it is to a tradition outside Ireland that sheturns. It is to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Discussing her `Requiem' for her son who disappearedin the Stalinist terrors of the late 1930s,Boland takes from this poem

`the connection it makesbetween her womanhood and her senseof a nation as a community of grief. ' (OL, 149)

And if ever in this countrythey shouldwant

To build me a monument

I consentto that honour

But only on condition that they

Erect it not on the sea-shorewhere I was born:

My last links with that were broken long ago,

Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens

Wherean inconsolableyoung shadeis seekingme

But here,where I stood for three hundred hours

66 And wherethey never,never opened the doorsfor me (OL, 149)

What Boland takes from Akhmatova is her alternative senseof nationhood.Rather than commemorationwith a statue,it is the voicesof the peopleshe queued with outsidethe prisongates she wants as a memorial.

`The truths of womanhood and the defeatsof a nation?An improbable intersection?

At first sight perhaps. Yet the idea of it openeddoors in my mind which had hitherto been closed fast. I beganto think there was indeeda connection,that my womanhood and my nationhoodwere meshedand linked at someroot. It was not just that I had a womanly feeling for those women who waited with handcarts,went into the sour stomachof ships and even - according to terrible legend - eyed their baby's haunchesspeculatively in the hungers of the 1840s. It was more than that. I was excited by the idea that if there really was an emblematicrelation betweenthe defeatsof womanhood and the suffering of a nation, I need only prove the first in order to reveal the second. If so, then Irishnessand womanhood, those tormenting fragments of my youth, could at last stand in for each other. Out of a painful apprenticeshipand an ethical dusk, the laws of metaphor beckonedme. ' (OL, 148)

As Boland notes such `repossession'is neither a single nor a static act, but a fluid processof de- and re-construction. The poem sequence`Outside History', of which

`TheAchill Woman'is the first poem,is part of this process.

67 The Friction Between Different Realms.

`The Achill Woman' is representativeof Boland's poetics in severalways. Many of

her best poemsare about encounters- with Sappho and the woman of the past in

`The Journey,' (SP, 66-68), her young poetic self in `A False Spring,' (OH, 29), the

dispossessedsoldiers in `The Colonists.' (LL, 25) It is the encounterswhich carry the

meaning of the poems,the `friction between different realms.' (OH, 44) In `The

Achill Woman' there is a point of connectionbetween the two women but the poem

is difference also about - class,education, age and social and economichistory

interact to locate the women in different realms nationally. Meaney argues in this

poem:

`...there is a sensein which both of thesewomen are stranded,one outside the terms

in which history is articulated, anotherwithin them. They talk on the threshold but

one goes back back in Helene Cixous, Boland in A Kind out, another ... whom cites

of Scar, has arguedthat in betweenis the spaceof women's writing, and Boland's

poems move towards it. The in betweenis left open in the poem, allowing the

differences betweenthe women to remain and to define their relationship, allowing

the gaps and silencesthe `interdict' to occupy the centre of the poem and to question the terms of the poet's authority.' (27)

This referenceto Cixous is one which has been made by other critics particularly in relation to her 1975 collection In her own image which draws heavily on ecriture feminine. And in poemssuch as `Fever' (SP, 77) and `The Muse Mother' (SP, 54) we can see her attraction to the notion of an `imaginary' female language.I would

68 suggesthowever that it is the ideasof the critic andpost-colonial theorist Homi

Bhabha that offer greater insight into Boland's poetic project.

In The Location of Culture Bhabha writes of his concept of the `Third Spaceof enunciation,' the spacewhere cultural identity always emerges and is contradictory and ambivalent.

`The intervention of the Third Spaceof enunciation, which makesthe structure of meaning and referencean ambivalentprocess, destroysthis mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealedas an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challengesour senseof the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticatedby the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displacesthe narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describesas being written in homogeneous,serial time. ' (28)

This is underscored by Boland'scommentary on the Achill womanin her prosework:`A history?A nation?Her memoriesor mine' (OL, 125)

In Bhahba's work the `in-between' is `the spacethat carriesthe burden and meaning of culture.' (29) It is a spacethat Boland's poetry is constantly drawn towards:

The Women

69 This is the hour I love: the in-between,

neither here-nor-therehour of evening.

The air is tea-colouredin the garden.

The briar rose is spilled crepe-de-Chine.

This is the time I do my work best,

going up the stairs in two minds,

in two worlds, carrying cloth or glass, leaving somethingbehind, bringing

somethingwith me I should have left behind. (SP, 83)

Many of Boland's poemsare set at dusk, the `in-betweentime' betweenday and night. In `The Women' the poet/personareturns to the exploration of the relationship betweenthe silencesof the past in relation to women's lives and the shapingof the contemporarypoet by the imagesand myths and icons of poetic tradition. The real women `of work, of leisure, of the night, ' who have `healedinto myth. ' The lives of ordinary women have been metamorphosedinto emblem and symbol in a tradition which she has inherited. The poet/ personais the bridge betweenthe women silenced and the women mythologised. Although she can escapeback into her ordered domestic world she cannot lose the senseof connection:

leavingsomething behind, bringing something I haveleft behind with me should ...

70 This senseof herself as the bridge, her life as the staircasebetween two identities recalls the image of the staircaseas liminal spacein Bhabha. In The Location of

Culture Bhabha refers to the artist ReneeGreen's symbol of the stairwell as a

`liminal space,' one which prevents identities polarising between arbitrary designationssuch as upper and lower:

`The stairwell as liminal space,in-between the designationsof identity, becomesthe processof symbolic interaction, the connectivetissue that constructsthe difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passagethat it allows, preventsidentities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passagebetween fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumedor imposedhierarchy. ' (30)

Staircasesrecur in Boland's poetry. For example,in `Monotony' a woman carrying a sheaf of nappiesdescends a spiral staircaseto `a well of questions,/ an oracle' to ask whether she is `priestess'or `sacrifice.' (SP, 55) In Boland's poetry she moves between identities, between the constructsof woman and poet, between the influences of a Gaelic Irish tradition and an Anglo-Irish tradition, betweenmyth and silence.

In Bhabha'swork the liminal is associatedwith the hybrid.His analysisof coloniser/colonisedrelations stresses the interdependenceand mutual constitution of their subjectivities. He arguesthat colonial identities on both sidesare constantly in a

71 state of flux, are unstableand `agonised' rather than fixed and oppositional. This

undercutsboth colonising and colonised claims to a `pure' or authentic identity.

Boland's hybridity can be seenas more than simply her Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish

inheritance. As a woman she moves betweenher genderedself and her national self,

refusing to reject either construct. This is why separatismis not an option for Boland

either in feminist or cultural politics. She seesherself rather as a subversivepoet

moving between the pre-existing structuresof poetry and those devaluedexperiences

which have been silenced.

The `friction between different realms' the encounterson the threshold influence

Boland's choice of myths to revise. Boland is attractedto the metaphor of the underworld, another version of her staircase.In the title poem of her 1987 collection

TheJourney Boland makesuse of this symbolism. Here sheuses and extendsthe heroic journey motif to explore the loss of women in poetic tradition. Shetakes as her model Virgil's epic TheAeneid and appropriatesthe form to explore her connectionwith women in the past. She also usesthe medieval dream vision where the reader falls asleepwhile reading a text and dreamsin the context of what hasjust been read. The genesisof the poem was the experienceof nearly losing her infant daughter to meningitis. The persona,sitting in her domesticworld at the end of the day, preoccupiedwith a sick child, is railing againstthe limitations of the subject matter of poetry wondering why there has never been a poem written about an antibiotic.

I finishedspeaking and the angerfaded and dark fell and the book beside me

72 lay openat the pageAphrodite

Sapphoin her love's duress (SP, 86-88) comforts ...

Sappho silently guides the speakerdown into the underworld to seethe suffering of

women in the past who had no hope for their young - no antibiotics against the

plagues of cholera, typhus etc. Sapphowarns the personaagainst defining women

by their `not ' her to her work as washerwoman... and asks recognise connection

with them.

"But these are women who went out like you

when dusk becamea dark sweet with leaves,

recovering the day, stooping, picking up

teddybears and rag dolls andtricycles and buckets -

"love's archaeology - and they too like you

stood boot deepin flowers once in summer

or saw winter come in with a single magpie

in a caul of haws, a solo harlequin."

At the pointof her connectionwith thesewomen, her recoveredmatrilineage, she is

told by Sapphothat shecannot `reach or speakto them' or evenbear witness to their lives andsuffering:

I whispered,"let me be

73 let me at leastbe their witness," but shesaid

"what you have seenis beyond speech,

beyond song, only not beyond love;"

This recalls for me Cixous' account of feminine writing in terms of loving which she

expressesin her essay `Coming to Writing: '

`The I into life I trembled: from the fear the dread moment came ... of separation, of death. I death I it disfigure, saw at work ... watched wound, paralyze, and massacre

from the moment my eyesopened to seeing. I discoveredthat the face was mortal,

that I have to it back from Nothingness and would snatch at every moment ... Becauseof my fear I reinforced love, I alerted all the forces of life, I armed love, with soul and words, to keep deathfrom winning. Loving: keeping alive: naming.'

(31)

Loving becomesa way of witnessing and keeping alive what would otherwise remain silent and annihilated. If we read the poem in this way the descentinto the underworld with Sappho as her guide becomesa return to the imaginary to seeka feminine writing, a way of expressingthe silences.The journey of the title becomes a searchfor a new kind of poetic languagein which such experiencescould be expressed.Boland is often attracted in her writing to the idea of a feminine language but is reluctant to fully embracethis. Here Sappho claims her as her `own daughter' offering her an alternative tradition and poetic model. Yet the ending is ambivalent:

nothing was changed;nothing was more clear

74 but it was wet and the year was late.

The rain was grief in arrears; my children

slept the last dark out safely and I wept.

Yearning rather than resolution seemsto me the tone of the collection. As Sappho

tells her pilgrim, `I have brought you here so you will know forever / the silencesin

which are our beginnings.' The tradition with which Boland choosesto align herself

then, is born of the silencesin which women have suffered, the past rather than

history.

It is the weight of this silencethat Boland takes on in both her poetry and her critical

writings. This processbegan as early as her secondcollection The War Horse

published in 1975. We can seeher exploration of `the truths of womanhood and the

defeatsof a nation' come together in such poemsas `The Famine Road' which parallels a narrative of the treatment and starvation of Irish workers by the British with a woman being told she is infertile. Much of the power and dramatic resonance of the poem comes from the use of dialogue. Both the representativesof the British army and establishmentand the anonymousvoice, presumably a doctor, are inhumane in their casual and carelesstones. The woman's personaltragedy is connectedto the casual murder of the Irish nation and the dying out of the `race:'

"It has gone better than we expected,Lord

Trevelyan, sedition, idleness,cured in one; from parish to parish, field to field, the wretcheswork till they are quite worn,

75 thenfester by their work; we marchthe corn

to the shipsin peace;this TuesdayI sawbones

out of my carriage window, your servantJones. "

"Barren, never to know the load

of his child in you, what is your body

now if not a famine road? " (SP, 19)

Boland was to return to this connection in her later poetry; the grief and loss of the nation as representedby the famine of the mid-nineteenth century and the daily lossesendured by women which were not seenas fit subject material for poetry. The parallelling of these two experiencesand the connectionBoland makesthrough the imagery of barrennessand emptinessbrings together the private and the public in a

`political' poem. The referenceto Trevelyan who was in chargeof the relief operation in the famine locates the poem in a particular historical reality. According to Eagleton:

`Trevelyan held that the effects of the famine should not be too thoroughly mitigated by British that its improvident learn their lesson; The aid, so victims might ... disasterin Trevelyan's view had miraculously resolved most of the country's problems, forcing its warring sectsinto co-operativeaction, fostering self reliance, quelling agrarian militancy and modernising the economy.' (32)

In her essay`Subject Matters' Boland arguesthat the equation of the political poem with the public poem is one of the weaknessesof the Irish tradition she inherited. (In

76 the essayshe traces this fusion back to the early 19th century poets and founders of the Nation such as Mangan.) In this equationtrue personalfeeling and connection get lost and what we are left with is empty rhetoric. It also diminishes the radical potential of the poem. `In such a poem the poet would be the subject. The object might be a horse, a distance,a human suffering. It hardly mattered.The public authorisation would give such sanction to the poet that the object would not just be silent. It would be silenced. The subject would be all-powerful. ' (OL, 178)As an example of her own seduction into this tradition she cites her early poem `The War

Horse'. This poem takes an actual experience,a traveller's horse invading a suburbangarden in winter while the teatime news in the house recounts details of the violence going on in Northern Ireland. The poem organisesitself around the oppositions of the force of nature and the stylised formality of the suburbangardens.

The woman watching from her window is contained, her safety comesat a price,

Boland suggests.Her containment shutsher off from the natural world and insulates her. Yet this feels like a loss, what are poets' concernsreduced to now?

But we, we are safe, our informed fear

Of fierce commitment gone; why should we care

If a rose, a hedge, a crocus are uprooted

Like corpses,remote, crushed,mutilated?

He stumbleson like a rumourof war, huge,

Threatening; neighbours use the subterfuge(SP, 17-18)

77 As a young poet Boland felt satisfied with this poem; she had taken private emblems

and made them communal and public symbols of violence and suffering. Gradually

she realisesthat what she has left out of this poem is herself, the complexity and

contradictions inherent in her own position at that time: `What I had not realized was

that I myself was a politic within the Irish poem: a young woman who had left the

assuredidentity of a city and its poetic customsand who had started on a life which

had no place in them. ' (OL, 179)

The bardic authority associatedwith the Irish poet was one which women as the

traditional objects of the poem- images of nationhood-couldnot have. Yet, this

position on the margins, the position of powerlessness,Boland felt, could have the

most radical potential:

`The final effect of the political poem dependson whether it is viewed by the reader

as an act of freedom or an act of power. This in turn has everything to do with the

authority of the speaker. Paradoxically that authority grows the more the speakeris

weakenedand made vulnerable by the tensions he or she creates. By the samelogic,

it is diminished if the speakerprotects himself or herself by the powers of language

he or she can generate.' (OL, 186)

The construct and idea of the Irish Bard as poetic authority remained resolutely male

despite the flowering of poetry written in both Irish and English by women at this

time. The bard retained a privilege and authority within the Irish poem `long taken from or renouncedby their British counterparts'and the legacy of this remains.As

Boland argues: `... whatever the dispossessionand humiliation of the outer world,

78 malenessremained a castesystem within the poem.' (OL, 191)Meaney argues that

the myth of the Irish artist takestwo forms.There is the true sonof motherIreland

(Heaney et al.) or the literary subversivein exile epitomisedby Joyce. Both stand in

relation to a maternal construct which both marshalsand undercutsfemale power.

The true son is protected by the nation as mother from colonial ravagesbut mother

Ireland was herself ravaged by colonialism and in need of her son'sprotection and

loyalty. In this Freudian dramathe literary subversiveis the oedipal exile escaping

from `mother church' even mother tongue. Meaney asks `what position as speaking

and writing subject is available to the Irish woman?' (33)

Interstitial Spaces: Boland's Suburbia.

Boland claims to have found her own position, the centre of her poetics, when she

married and moved out of the literary life of Dublin to the suburbs.The location of her poems in suburbia marked a changeof style in Boland's writing. Shehas written about this period as a time of unlearning received aestheticsand beginning to trust her instincts. This experience and shift in location and perspectivewere crucial to her development as a poet where shebecame increasingly concernedwith the gaps and silencesin the Irish poem she had inherited and revered.

In his essay`The Commitment to Theory' Homi Bhabha discussesthe involvement of women in the miners' strike of 1984 as an illustration of what he calls `the hybrid moment of political change.'

`Herethe transformationalvalue of changelies in the rearticulation,or translation,of elementsthat areNeither the one(unitary working class)or the Other(the politics of

79 Gender) but something else besidesthat conteststhe terms and territories of both.

There is a negotiation between genderand class,where each formation encounters

the displaced,differentiated boundariesof its group representationand enunciative

sites in which the limits and limitations of social power are encounteredin an

agonistic relation.' (34)

Boland's hybrid moment is a processof gradually recognising that the Irish tradition

to which she was allowed to belong as a poet did not recogniseher sexedness.As

early as The War Horse she beganto be aware of the `splitting' betweenmind and

body which had to occur for her to be a `poet' in this hybrid tradition. In essayssuch

as `Turning Away' she equatesher body/sexuality with languageand form. Looking

back on her young self beginning to questionthe languageand forms she had

inherited she writes:

`I could give a voice to the certaintiesof my mind but not to the questionsof my

body. Once I had seenmyself at that table engagedin the act of history, the work of

the poem. Now I saw myself - as if I had steppedoutside my body - shrivelled and

discounted: a woman at a window engagedin a power of languagewhich rebuffed

the truth of her life. ' (OL, 114)

Searchingfor new forms of poetry she writes about the poems she has inherited; the

Irish bardic tradition, the English metropolitan poem, Victorian romanticism,

nationalism and a Yeatsian modernism: `They threatenedto take away from me my unproved senseof a country and a languageand, with them, my own tentative acceptanceof the connectionbetween these and my sexuality.'(OL, 117) Her poetic

80 evolution is a processof decolonisation,of `unlearningreceived aesthetics'but such

aestheticscome from her nationalist past as well as its colonialist history. From these

dual inheritancesshe must createa third space.Her poetry is concernedwith the

searchfor a form which can give voice to this as yet unarticulated space.

At this time also she becameaware of the death of Sylvia Plath and read her poetry.

She becameinterested in Plath not simply becauseshe admired her poetry but becauseshe came to seePlath as representativeof the fractures and stressesbetween the life of a woman and that of a poet. Such stressesfound their most famous expressionin the 1986 essay,`The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma' (35) where Boland looks at the tension betweenthe demandsof femininity and the role proscribedfor a post - Romantic lyric poet. The main dilemma that the woman poet faces is a psychosexualone made so by the `profound fracture betweenher senseof the obligations of her womanhood andthe shadowy demandsof her gift. ' (OL, 247)

Sucha dilemma, Boland argues,creates for women an unacceptableconflict, a refusal to bridge the distance betweenwriting poems and taking on the authoritative label of poet.

Maguire, revisiting this essayfrom the perspectiveof a woman poet in 1999, argues that there is something about the form of lyric poetry which makesit especially difficult for women to write, namely its associationswith the self. She arguesthat although the self constructed in the lyric is a fiction, it is a desiring subject, an `I' that `wants.' In a patriarchal society women are the desired objects rather than desiring subjects and lyric poetry has been the form above all where the status of women as desired objects has been reinforced. (36) This relationship between the

81 woman poet and the lyric as problematic is a narrative that has been visited by a

number of critics from the 80s and 90s. Cora Kaplan writes about it in her 1986

essay `Language and Gender' where, drawing on Lacanian theory, she argues that

women as writers are alienatedfrom the languageof poetry at the very deepestlevels of their identity - the levels in which they are constructedas speakingsubjects. (37)

Maguire arguesthat: `the romantic stresson transcendenceand the `egotistical sublime' is radically at odds with any traditional notion of acceptablefeminine identity. With the dominance of romanticism and the post-romantic lyric, the always-irreconcilableroles of women and poet - the former constructed around self- effacement and constraint, the latter dependenton self-confidenceand daring - are even further displaced.' (38)

Such displacementis explored in poemssuch as `SuburbanWoman' and `Ode to

Suburbia.' These poemsmark a departurein Boland's poetry and embody the

`splitting' she has come to feel. `SuburbanWoman' usesimages of war, rape, surrender,defeat and compromiseto explore both the violation of the land and history through the creation of suburbia and the defeat and compromise of the woman contained within it. Boland's suburbia is a battlegroundfull of `lewd whispers,' `rape on either side' and `proxy violation. ' The poem recalls T. S. Eliot's

`Preludes' (39) in both its structure and its use of language.Whereas in Eliot's poem we have a seriesof vignettes of urban life, herewe have a seriesof vignettes of suburbanlife taking us through different stagesin the day of an unnamed suburban woman. Eliot was one of many poets who dismissedthe lives of women in suburbia

- in `The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ' (40) for example- and the structure of

82 the poem can be read as an oblique comment on the valorisation of the urban in

poetry and the dismissal of the suburbanas a female spacewhere nothing happens.

Underlying the imagery of war and violation of the land, in Boland's poem, is the

history of partition:

Haemorrhagingto hacked

roads,to where in back gardens,like a pride

of lions toiled for booty, tribal acresdied

and her world with them. She saw their power to sever

with a scar. She is the sole survivor. (SP, 27)

Such imagery of violence and territorial warfare was not uncommon in Irish poetry

in the 70s, particularly in the work of the Ulster poets but it was usually located in an

urban male space.Boland locates such images in the feminine spacesof routine and

domesticlives. As with `Preludes'there is a senseof routine covering something

more desperateand yet more visionary. The imagesof violation continue into the

secondvignette:

Morning: mistress of talcums, spun and secondcottons, run tights

sheis, courtesanto the lethal

rapine of routine. The room invites.

Shereaches to fluorescethe dawn.

83 The kitchenlights like a brothel.

Boland, like Roberts and many other poets of this time, makesuse of the myth of

Ceres and Persephonehere. In Greek myth, Ceresthe goddessof grain, agriculture

and fertility searchesfor nine daysfor her missing daughterPersephone who had

been seized by Hades and carried off to the underworld. In her grief for Persephone

and her rage at learning that Zeus had sanctionedHades' seizureof her daughter,

Cerescaused all vegetation to cease.At Ceres' request it was grantedthat

Persephonecould spendtwo-thirds of the year in the upper world and one third in

the underworld. Thus the year was divided into the seasonsof growth and harvest

and of winter. The emphasisin Boland's poem is not on the positive aspectsof the

myth as explored by many feminist poets who have revisioned this but on the

sacrifice of Ceres, the loss of her individuality and talent.

The chairsdusted and the morning coffeebreak behind, she starts pawning

her day againto the curtains,the red carpets,the stair rods,at lastto the bed,

the unmade bed where once in an underworld of limbs, her eyesfreckling the night like jewelled

lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled, bargained out of nothingnessher child...

84 The ending of the poem takes up anothercompromise. It beganwith the meetingof town and country and ends with the woman writer trying to reclaim her writing self from her domesticcontainment. Cereshere is the poet who weighs her sacrifice of her life as a poet against the birth of her daughterand her life as a mother.

Her kitchen blind down -a white flag - the day's assault over, now shewill shrug

a hundredsmall surrenders off as images still born, unwritten metaphors,blank pages;

and on this territory, blindfold, we meet at lastveterans of a defeat

heal, no truce will ......

The imagery of ongoing conflict over spaceand territory is sustainedthroughout the poem. The Suburbanwoman is split betweenthe demandsof her femininity, her sacrifice and the assertionof spaceneeded for her `craft.' Boland then takes the rhetoric and diction of the contemporarypolitical poem-imagesof conflict, rape, partition -and transforms them through their location in suburbia. As in the conventional nationalist poem the territory fought over is constructed as female but in Boland's poetry the claims of both sides have validity. Partition for the suburban mother usually means,however, the splitting of and denial of her creativity.

85 Fluidity rather than fixity, a constant interchangeand movementbetween statesis

characteristicof `SuburbanWoman' and of Boland's poetry generally. It is also a

characteristicof the suburbsin which Boland locates her poetic subjectivity. The location of many of Boland's poemsin the suburbsbrings us back again to the notion of a liminal space.In post-colonial theory the liminal has come to mean any

`in-between' spacein which cultural changeoccurs -a region in which there is a continual process of movementand interchangebetween different states.For Bhabha the liminal and hybridity go hand in hand and both are positive in their emphasison processrather than stasis.The suburbsare not usually seenas progressive-indeed

Bhabha (41) seesthem as quite the opposite. However Boland's suburbsare located on the outskirts of Dublin, the threshold between the new urban culture and the old rural spaces,a zone of transition betweentown and country, between a rural pre- modern past and a metropolitan present.The dichotomies which exist in Irish culture betweenNorth and South and East and West both have their origins in the relationship with Britain. The long processof colonialism and cultural imperialism was stage-managedvia Dublin and in the 20th century Dublin has continued to play its role as gateway to the west for influences from the East.

In The Location of Culture Bhabha refers to a Boundary as the place from which

`somethingbegins its presencing.' (42) Thus Boland herself a `hybrid' poet chooses to locate her `presencing' not in the rural poetic or the metropolitan poem but the new and hybrid spaceof the suburbs.The suburbsare usually referred to in derogatory terms, as indicating a particular mindset. Boland makesin her suburbs,

86 however, a new poetic space,one in which she can explore the complexity and

variety of ordinary women's lives.

In `Ode to Suburbia' Boland plays with the denigration of the suburb. The monotony

and lack of hope is well conveyedby the inversion of the fairy tale imagery,

reminiscent of Ann Sexton's `Transformations.' (43) The opening again recalls

Eliot's `Preludes.'

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaksin passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out days (44) ends of smoky ...

Herein Eliot's poemthe urbanpublic spaceis the poeticsphere explored and valorised; in Boland's poem it is the private suburbanspace:

Six o'clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister

Your dark,your housewivesstarting to nose

Out eachother's day,the claustrophobia

Of your back gardensvaricose

With shrubs,make an ugly sister

Of you suburbia.(SP, 30)

The imagery hereis of ugliness not beauty, of sameness,monotony, entrapment.

Whereasin `SuburbanWoman' the imagery is of violation, here it is of seduction.

87 The `shy countryside' is fooled by the plainnessof Suburbiaand `falls, then rises

from your bed changed....' Boland's depiction of suburbiahere is playful but draws

on the hostility expressedtowards suburbiaby poets, writers and critics. The

dominance of the city as a cultural spaceand the connotationsof the `urban' as sexy,

happeningand contemporaryhave left the suburbanto be the poor relation- all that is

not these things. The emphasisin modernity and postmodernityhas been the city as

spaceof cultural creativity. For exampleBerman's analysis of the experienceof modernity is grounded in the life of the city. (45) The suburbson the other hand have been portrayed negatively by artists and cultural critics. Q.D. Leavis writes about the

`emptinessand meaninglessiteration of the suburbanlife' and views suburban

`inflexible brutal it has fine to draw it is culture as and ... no rhythms on and not it is formed but is serious ... not only to convey merely crude statesof mind destructiveof any fineness' (46)

In poetrywhere suburbia does appear it is gazedon with contempt.T. S.Eliot's suburbancommuter embodiesdisintegration of the self in `Preludes'and living death in `The WasteLand':

Underthe brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought deathhad undone so many...' (47)

Or we haveJohn Betjeman's invitation in 1937to the Luftwaffe, `Come,friendly/ bombs and fall on Slough'. The bombers were then given specific targets - factories, housesand suburbanconformity. (48)

88 Suburbiahas fared no better in popular culture. The main genrewhich locates itself

in suburbiais the television sitcom, not noted for its social criticism. At the time

when Boland was writing her poetry the other cultural genrewhich attacked and

vilified suburbiawas the punk movement of the 70s. To punk, suburbiawas the

enemy. Indeed for a consistentimagery of suburbiaas negative, soullessand

conformist, it is to popular music from the last forty years that we should turn. This treatment of suburbia is closer to Boland's moving as it does betweenthe mundane and the revelatory. The punk album `The Sound of the Suburbs' (49) presentsa suburbia similar to that presentedby Boland in her 1980 collection In Her Own

Image. IndeeedBoland's `Ode to Suburbia' with its articulation of suburban claustrophobiaand suburban discontenthas similarities to the sentimentsproduced on this album.

Suchdespised conformity and respectability was characterisedin Western culture as feminine. Medhurst, in his study of versions of suburbia in British popular culture, commentson the way the conformism and respectability of suburbiais feminised in texts suchas Dennis Potter's `Penniesfrom Heaven' where the genderedmodel is of

`menwho dream of escapingroutine and rut, women who unquestionablyaccept or even at worst embodythem. ' (50)

Indeed in cultural and misogynist fantasy women's bodies are equatedwith suburbia.

Paul Oliver in his discussionon the imagery of the suburb equatesthe form of the semi with the femalebody. `... The swelling bosom of the bay windows combined to communicate maternal warmth. Such curves dominatedthe necessarilyrectilinear

89 elementsin the facade' (51) So the suburbsrepresent the ambivalent cultural

attitudesto the feminine-necessaryas a counter to the public, male, urban sphereof creativity but ultimately despisedand seenas a place to escapefrom.

Such ambivalencecan be found in Boland's 1980 collection In her Own Image.

Indeedthe following lines from the poem `Mastectomy,' where the woman reflects on the removal of her breasts,encompass this ambivalence: `So they have taken off/what slaked them first, what they have hated since.' (SP, 36-37) The dark sideof suburbia introduced in such poemsas `SuburbanWoman' is given its fullest expressionin this collection. Here sheturns from the formal, crafted lyric to experimentswith ecriture feminine.

The opening poem `Tirade for the Mimic Muse' attacks directly through violent imagery the patriarchal muse of masculinist discourseand implicitly a poetic tradition and aestheticwhich excludesand silenceswomen as subjects.

I've caught you out. You slut. You fat trout.

So here you are fumed in candle-stink.

Its yellow balm exhumesyou for the glass.

How you arch and pout in it!

How you poach your face in it!

Anyone would think you were a whore -

An ageing out-of-work kind-heartedtart.

I know you for the ruthless bitch you are: Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse -

90 Our Muse of Mimic Art. (SP, 31-32)

`Our Muse of Mimic Art' recalls and parodies `Our Lady, ' another representationof

symbolic and ideal womanhood which Irish women have been measuredagainst.

The museis forcedto put asideher artifice, hermake-up, and all the masquesshe has

assumedin art/poetry to protect herself and gazeupon a different 'horror':

The kitchen screw and the rack of labour,

The washthumbed and the dishcracked,

The screamof beatenwomen,

The crime of babiesbattered,

The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief

That seeksasylum behind suburb walls -

The poet brings herself into the last two versesupbraiding the muse for her own blind following of her which she now regrets.

And I who mazedmy way to womanhood

Throughall your hallsof mirrors,making faces,

To think I waited on your trashy whim!

I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.

I will showyou true reflections,terrors.

You are the Muse of all our mirrors.

Look in them and weep.

91 The patriarchal muse to which women writers have looked for definition and

reflection is forced now to look at the `mirrors' Boland holds up to her in the rest of

the collection and they are a very different set of imagesfrom the hackneyedand

cliched symbols of womanhood the muse has endorsed.

The last line echoesand parodiesShelley's `Ozymandias': `Look on my works, ye

Mighty, and despair!' Indeed throughout the poem there are echoesof the canon

particularly the romantics. `Your glass cracked, your nerve broke...' echoesthe line

`the mirror crackedfrom side to side' from Tennyson's `The Lady of Shallot' who

daredto gaze outside of her contained and imprisoned world. Weekesargues that

`trout' recalls the `silver trout' of the `Songof Wandering Aengus,' Yeats's tribute to the god of love and to the pursuit of romantic love. Weekesreads it as suggesting that those `who follow the Muse of Mimic Art attempt to follow the early Yeats, to see and depict the world as did the obvious model, the famousIrish poet.' (52)

Weekesmay be right here as Boland expressesher feelings about Yeats in several interviews. While she expressesadmiration for Yeats and was clearly influenced by him in her early poetry, she acknowledgesthat the Yeatsianpoem which she and other poets of her generationinherited was a poem in which the world was

`compellingly but incompletely politicised. ' Although Boland seesgender as part of this she asserts:

`more serious still was the conservatismand insularity which that indicated in the poem itself. I was to find out that- in a very disappointing way-the Irish poem was not the least subversiveabout gender.In other words it demoted and suspected

92 women's experience, exactly as the society it occurred in demoted and suspectedthat

experience.I knew enough- even as quite a young poet- to know that there should

not be such a correlation between the conservativeelements of an art form and a

society.'(53)

If Yeats, Shelley and Tennysonare critiqued in the poem, the poet to whom Boland

pays homage in terms of style is Sylvia Plath. In its direct addressand its short

sentencesand violent metaphorswe can seethe influence of Plath, an influence

which can be felt throughout this collection.

In His Own Image: Casting off the Male form

All the poems in this collection deal with the effect on a woman's subjectivity of the

distortions of female identity in patriarchal culture prefigured by the mimic muse.

They also portray the reality of women's lives in contemporary suburbiathrough

poems on domestic violence. Although fiction in the 70s had dealt with the latent

violence and frustration of Suburbia - Marilyn French's `The Woman's Room' (54)

is the best known example- such topics were not the stuff of Irish poetry.

Boland's `Anorexic' for example looks at the self-hatred and alienation from the female body brought about by the actual and metaphorical violence directed towards the female in patriarchal culture. The speakerhas internalised the hatred of the flesh and her own sexual female self:

Fleshis heretic.

My body is a witch,

93 I am burning it.

Yes I am torching

hercurves and paps and wiles.

Theyscorch in my self denials.

How shemeshed my head

in the half-truths

of her fevers

till I renounced

milk and honey

andthe tasteof lunch.

I vomited

her hungers.

Now the bitch is burning.

I am starvedand curveless.

I am skin and bone.

Shehas learned her lesson. (SP, 35)

Thewoman's alienation from her bodyis shownin the switchingof pronouns;`I

vomited / her hungers. / Now the bitch is burning. ' The dualistic split of masculine mind from female body has been successfullyinternalised and the speakerdesires to

94 annihilate her female self completely. Shedesires a return to the male body, to be the

sparerib once again where shewill grow `angular and holy' and escapefrom the

female flesh which is equatedwith impurity, greedand original sin. Her entry into

the male body will make her forget her origins:

in a small space

the fall

into forked dark,

into python needs

heaving to hips and breasts and lips and heat andsweat and fat andgreed.

The poem is written in three line stanzasuntil the final one which expandsinto a five line stanzawhich mimics the `fall' from the male body into the female form with its

`python needs/ heaving to hips and breasts.' The assonanceand alliteration of these lines, the slow, rhythmic emphasison the last two lines makesthe female body sound obscene.The poem like others in In Her Own Image works on severallevels.

There is the literal effect on women's senseof self of masculine constructionsof the feminine. Much theoretical work was being produced at this time on women's bodies as sites of struggle. SusanBordo (55) for example,argues that many anorexicssee themselvesas having two parts: a male part telling them to control the other `flabby,' female part. Bordo proposesthat these again are symptoms of underlying cultural attitudes: a fear of the demandsof the female body coupledwith disdain for

95 traditional female roles. She arguesthat such an ideology in which women

specifically are seenas having insatiable desiresthat needto be controlled tends to

be expressedduring periods when women are becoming more assertiveand a threat

to the statusquo. We can also read it as another exampleof Boland's concernto

interrogate the equationin Irish poetry of the nation with the feminine. The

effacement of the material body of woman is one of the effects of the metaphorical

relationship betweenIreland and womanhood. On another level it also explores

women's art and writing. As Randolph argues: `On the level of languageand

metaphor, the anorexic `fall' away from the female body, into a narrative of origin

beginning and ending in the male body, becomesa model for the woman writing,

representingherself within a masculinist discourse.' (56) Through her merging of

theme and form here Boland explores the way women writers are encouragedto

erasetheir sex and shapetheir poetic forms within a masculinist tradition.

To be a poet in Ireland in the 60s and 70s was, as Boland saysin her essays,to becomemasculine, to embracethe world of the mind and erasethe world of the body

-the splitting that Boland comes back to over and over again in her work.

To produce words, to claim the spaceof the `bard' was literally to deny her sexed femininity. In the poem `A False Spring' the older poet revisits her young poetic self and sees an image of herself `her mind so frail her body was its ghost.' Boland's speakerhere wants to tell her that she can rest `sheis embodied now.' (OH, 29) The older poet has rejected an aestheticthat requires denial of the female body.

Maud Eilmann in her study The Hunger Artists looks at the enmeshedmeanings of writing and hunger in western culture. Ellman's central preoccupationis the

96 relationship betweenthe labour of starvation and the birth of words and texts. (57) In

an interesting twist on Ellmann's thesis Boland's style in this collection is thin-she pares her words down as if literally casting off the `receivedaesthetic' she has imbibed.

There have been different meaningsattributed to anorexia in Western culture. One meaningis that anorectic women are `hunger strikers in disguise starving to defy the patriarchal values that confine their sex,' (58) turning their anger inwards and eating themselvesup. This interpretation fits well with the tone of Boland's poem and indeedthe whole collection. Anger and rage pervadesit: `Now the bitch is burning. '

In this context the flight from knowledge can also be read as the rejection of the myths of womanhood perpetuatedby the nationalist tradition. A return to the materiality of the body is a way of casting off woman's metaphoricalhistory and

Boland's collusion in it. Boland's poem then is an attack on the Irish tradition under nationalism - the woman's body as site of struggle - and what that does to women both in a symbolic and material sense.Images of starvation also haunt the poem -the real starvation of the women in the Great Famine which she returns to in her later collections, particularly In A Time of violence.

Jody Allen-Randolph, in her discussionof this volume as ecriture feminine, argues that the secondhalf of the volume shifts from the construction of woman as patriarchalvictim to a `reinscribing'of `femaleidentity from the experienceof the femalebody and feminine pleasure. ' Drawing on Cixous'sargument in `TheLaugh of the Medusa'she sees these poems as envisioning`a newaesthetic which reconceptualisesthe body as a subject for poetry and as a mode of knowing. ' (59)

97 This can be seenin the poem `Solitary' which celebratesthe female speaker's

experienceof masturbation.The imagery, which is often religious, draws attention to the subversivenature of the poem and to the female body as site of power and spirituality:

Night:

An oratoryof dark, a chapel of unreason.

Here in the shubbery the shrine.

I am its votary, its season.

Flames single to my fingers

expert to pick out their heart, the sacredheat (SP, 38)

The powerand spirituality of femalesexuality is setagainst the repressiveteachings of the Catholic church which teachesthat masturbationis a mortal sin: `You could

98 die for this. / The gods could make you blind. ' The poem plays with dualistic

thinking, valuing `unreason' and the body and flesh as the site of knowledge:

How my flesh summers,

how my mind shadows

meshedin this brightness,

how my cry

blasphemes

light and dark,

screams

land from sea,

makesword flesh that now makes me

This refusal of Catholic discoursesof female sexuality and the privileging of the sexual body as a site of desire and knowledge is a constant in the work of Michele

Roberts discussedin Chapter 3. In Ireland in 1980, however, such poetic work was rare and Boland paid a price for this.

Boland herself talks of her exclusion from the so-called poetic discourseof the time becauseof its feminist associations.Indeed as a result of its reception in Ireland

Boland began publishing in the United Stateswhere she felt the discoursesand tensions in poetry were more open and generous.

99 Ailbhe Smith, in her essay`Dodging around the Grand Piano,' writes about the way

women who have written about sexare ignored in the Irish literary critique. She

suggeststhat `literary critics are operating like the law, intervening to constrain or

outlaw the transgressiveexcesses of the poet's sexual behaviour.' (60) To feminist

poets and publisherssuch as Smith, In Her Own Image was a pioneering collection:

`The processof symbolic embodimentwas initiated by In Her Own Image, which thus marked a crucial moment in the development of a feminist aestheticfor Irish

poets.It articulatedwhat was shrouded - `dulsed'in shadows,secrets and silence,

tore women's sexuality out of the realm of the tacit, and exposedit, angrily, in words and in public. One of the most remarkableand ground-breakingaspects of the collection is its rejection of either romanticism or domestification as solutions for living or understanding.The excision of traditional (and canonical)versions of women's sexuality undertakenhere by Boland is a necessarybasis for the achievementof self-representationwhich, in turn, is a crucial moment in the strategic processof self-realisation.' (61)

Yet the romantic and the domestic and the romanticising of the domesticdo shape many of Boland's suburbanpoems. If In Her Own Image was the text that was labelled `feminist', the collection Night Feed published in 1982was the collection which led to the labelling of Boland as a `domestic' poet by many reviewers with all the misreading and reductionism that such a term implies.

100 The Muse Mother: Embracing the female form.

Although many of thesepoems were written at the sametime as the poems in In Her

Own Image the style is quite different. The settings of the poemsare often domestic

interiors but Boland explores them in a lyrical way, incorporating nature and

continuing her theme of the limited construction of the female in masculinist

discoursesof art. What we have in this collection is what Reading describesas the

`revelatory uniquenessof the ordinary,' (62) a spacebetween routine and ritual. For

example in `Night Feed,' the title poem, Boland conveysthe feelings of feeding her

daughter at dawn. The setting is ceremonial, the tone hushed,intimate and expectant:

This is dawn.

Believe me

This is your season,little daughter.

The momentdaisies open,

The hour mercurial rainwater

Makesa mirror for sparrows.

It's time we drowned our sorrows. (SP, 58)

The personahere is content,in harmonywith the cycleof the naturalworld andshe

realises

This is the best I can be,

Housewife

To this nursery

Where you hold on,

101 Dearlife.

This poem can be read in the light of Q. D. Leavis's remarks on suburbia mentioned earlier. `Night Feed' and many of the poemsin this volume celebratethe `fine rhythms' of suburbia.

The poems in Night Feed mark a new resolution for Boland. The splitting and violence of `SuburbanWoman' is absentfrom this volume. Adrienne Rich has written that `poetry was where I lived as no-one'smother, where I existed as myself. '

(63) In Night Feed Boland's poetic personaand her maternal personamerge - in this volume Boland writes as `someone'smother. ' Yet motherhood is not glorified - the poemspresent complex and ambiguousresponses, epitomised by `Monotony' or

`Hymn. ' The poemsemphasise instinct rather than reason.Above all they find beauty and revelation in the ordinary. Boland writes about what she calls the

`Romantic Heresy', a debasedform of romanticism which limits what women can write about or encouragesthem to reject their everyday experiencesas not the stuff of poetry or to romanticise their experiencesand so render them more poetic but less authentic. (OL, 239-254) This concernwith the authentic can be seenin her poem

`The Muse Mother' which returns to Boland's concernwith how to inscribe the female but in particular the domesticmother into a languageand tradition which has excluded and silenced her. Technically accomplishedthe poem takes a `moment,' an ordinary everyday image, and freezesit.

My window pearls wet.

The bare rowan tree

102 berriesrain.

I can see from where I stand a womanhunkering - her busy hand worrying a child's face,

working a nappy liner over his sticky, loud round of a mouth... (SP, 54)

Boland has a strong visual senseoften depicting moments, interiors or vignettesof daily life in detailed ways invoking light and shade,giving the reader a strong visual impression. At times she lets the vignettes convey the meaning of the poem, at other times like herethere is a point of departurewhere she reflects on the wider significance of the image.

If I couldonly declineher - lost noun out of context, stray figure of speech- from this rainy street again to her roots, she might teach me

103 a new language:

to be a sibyl

able to sing the past

in puresyllables,

limning hymns sung

to belly wheat or a woman,

ableto speakat last

my mothertongue.

Boland is aware that there is no tradition of this suburban,ordinary woman wiping a

child's face in poetry. Shewould like to `decline' her, to connectwith a lost female

tradition but is aware of the dangerof appropriating this woman and turning her into

symbol as her masculine predecessorshave done. Boland here recalls that other poet

of suburban sensibilities Philip Larkin. Compare `Afternoons.' (64)

Summeris fading:

The leavesfall in onesand twos

From trees bordering

The new recreation ground.

In the hollowsof afternoons

Young mothers assemble

At swing and sandpit

Setting free their children ...

104 Their beauty hasthickened.

Something is pushing them

To the side of their own lives.

But whereasLarkin seesthe women whose `beauty has thickened' as powerless against the relentlessand uniform cycle of their lives, Boland's `muse mother' conveys somethingpotentially celebratory if the poet could only `decline her.'

The lines `able to speakat last / my mother tongue' evoke again the post-Lacanian ideasof Cixous or Irigaray but also echoesthe colonisation of the Irish languageby the British. The silencing of the `mother' connectsthe two.

This senseof disarticulation from languageis what connectsthe lossesthat Boland explores in her poetry. This senseof herself as sexlessand statelessis explored in her essay`Turning Away. ' (OL, 117) It also positions Boland's poetry in both a feminist and a post-colonial mode. The centrality of languageand representationto identity formation and the searchfor a linguistic authenticity to offset the inherited senseof disconnectionare central to both. The fantasiesof a return to a primal/pre-symbolic languageand the return to a pre-colonial languageare explored in Boland's poetry, but she ultimately eschewsthis strategyas too simplistic and not taking into account the complexity of her own hybrid position.

The Muse Mother: Boland As Feminist Poet?

The reviews of both Night Feed and In Her Own Image illustrate the equivocal reception of Boland's poetry and her relationship to mainstreamfeminism.

105 Although In Her Own Image in particular was reviewed as a `feminist' text, Boland

has always been ambivalent about the relationship between feminism and writing

poetry. Although she is concernedthroughout her work with putting female

experienceinto the Irish poem, in many interviews she goes out of her way to disassociateherself from the label of `feminist poet.' For examplein an interview with Randolph she states:

`Feminism is an enabling perceptionbut it's not an aestheticone. The poem is a

least for kinds beliefs, place - at me - where all of certaintiesstop. All sorts of convictions, certainties get left on that threshold. I couldn't be a feminist poet.

Simply becausethe poem is a place of experienceand not a place of convictions - there is nothing so illuminated and certain as that sort of perspectivein the poemsI write. My poemshave nothing to do with perspective:they have to do with the unfinished businessof feeling and obsession.But outside the poem, feminism has been a vital, enabling way of seeingthe climate in which I write the poem. It shows up the obstructions, the operationsof power... ' (65)

Yet the rejection of a feminist aestheticsits uneasily with Boland's concernwith aestheticsin Irish poetry. Elsewhere she advocateswhat she terms humanism rather than feminism. Shetalks of the needto `humanise' female experiencerather than

`feminise' it, to broadenthe scopeof what constitutesthe human and thereby change poetry. (OL, 245) For Boland female experiencesstand as metaphorsfor whole areas of human experienceerased from the tradition, silences that are there throughout human experience. Vicki Bertram arguesthat Boland's project ultimately fails because`humanism occludes genderdifference and imposesa masculinesubject. '

106 (66) Boland's metaphorstherefore, Bertram argues,collapse back onto their female

subjects. Certainly if the critical reception of her work is anything to go by this

equation of the feminine with the human has been missed. A comparisonof the

reception of Boland's poem `Anorexia' discussedabove with Paul Muldoon's later

poem `Aisling' (67) demonstratesthis. Muldoon's poem askswhether Ireland should

be symbolisedby the disease`Anorexia':

Was she Aurora, or the goddessFlora,

Artemidora,or Venusbright,

or Anorexia,who left

a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?

Nationalism is herepresented as a destructive neurosiswith a false self-image.

Muldoon's poem takes the hunger strikers as its context. Boland takes the violence

done to women materially and symbolically through an aesthetictradition which

deniestheir flesh and blood reality. Although Muldoon's poem was written later and is arguably the lesserpoem, it standsfor a wider metaphor in a way that Boland's is not allowed to do. For example,the critic Edna Longley usesMuldoon's poem in her essay`From Cathleento Anorexia' which explores the changing way in which

Ireland has been symbolisedin poetry. (68) The protest of the hunger strikers is political male and `national', the death of hundreds of women from anorexiais still relegatedto the private and particular. Boland's poem, I would argue,is about what the national tradition has done to women in a much wider context but this context was usually ignored by her critics. The woman poet who writes from the female body or from feminine experience,it seems,cannot speakfor humanity.

107 Boland advocatesa subversiverather than a separatiststance. She criticises what she

seesas a separatistimpulse in feminist poetry typified by the critical writings of

Adrienne Rich which plead with the woman poet to `discardthe complexities of true

feeling for the relative simplicities of anger.' (OL, 245) As with nationhood so with

gender. She wants a dialogue with the masculinetradition rather than to cast it off.

What shedoes recognise,however, is that some of the silencesin the Irish poem

have already begun to be remediedby male poets and that sheis part of that tradition whether she wants to be or not. What is significant to Boland is the importanceof dialogue not only with other poets and traditions but also with herself and this self reflexivity is very much a part of feminist writing and politics of this time. Although she may not regard herself as a `feminist' poet, her work hasbeen shapedby and within the discoursesof feminism.

Boland started publishing with the feminist press Arlen House and throughout the

80s ran workshops for women who wanted to write poetry. The processand interaction of these were important for Boland and she writes about them as a defining and radicalising moment. (69)

Boland is not easily pigeonholed. Sheembodies contradictions. Individualistic and bardic at times, she seesherself as representativeof a poetic tradition. When Sappho addressesher as `my own daughter' in `The Journey' we are not surprised.Boland never questionsthe basic premise of a national literary tradition nor her right to have a place in it. What she aims to do is to `repossess'and changeit:

108 `I have come to believe that the woman poet is an emblematic figure in poetry now

in the sameway the modernist and romantic poets once were. And for the same

reasons. Not becauseshe is awkward and daring and disruptive but because- like

the modernist and romantic poets in their time - she internalizesthe stressesand

truths of poetry at a particular moment. Her project therefore is neither marginal nor

specialist. It is a project which concernsall of poetry, all that leads into it in the past

and everywhere it is going in the future. ' (OL, 235)

Here she is close to Eliot's ideas in `Tradition and the Individual Talent, ' (70) where

he arguesthat a tradition is not a static entity. It is a contestedspace and one which

will shift and reconstruct itself in line with the contemporaryvalues, literary and

political. Here Boland emphasisesthe power of the woman poet writing in

contemporaryIreland to rearrangethe given tradition. Shewants then to rearrange

the canon rather than reject it. Yet her workshops and what has been regardedby

some critics as her `essentialism,' her focus on the connecting power of motherhood,

positions her at times in a communal and woman - centred camp associatedwith a

more radical feminist poetics. Privileged in classterms and educationally and

acceptedas part of a poetic establishment,(71) yet derided and forced to publish

outside Ireland becauseof the controversial nature of her themes.Innovative and

experimental she refusesto be claimed by any particular camp. Yet all these

experimentswith form are about interrogating the metaphoricrelationship between her Irishness her language form and womanhood - about the searchfor a and which will expressthe truth of her life, about what she calls in one poem `the contrary passionto be whole. '

109 the lingua franca of a lost land.

A dialect in which

what hadnever been could still be found:

That infinite horizon. Always far

and impossible. That contrary passion

to be whole. (LL, 29)

That `contrarypassion to be whole' - to havea sexand a stateis what drives

Boland's explorationswith form and can be used to explore Boland's complex

relationship with a female tradition.

Sexless and Stateless?

In her prose memoir Object LessonsBoland writes about her early developmentas a poet and reflects on this from her current subject position. In an essay entitled `In

Searchof a Language' she documentsthe attraction to her young teenageself, a girl in searchof a nation, an identity, of the classicalmodels of poetry suchas Virgil. It is an attraction to formalism and the rational and could almost be a description of the symbolic order. Writing of the Gaelic poetic tradition she says:

`The paradox of those traditions, with their senseof exclusiveness,was that I saw the power of languagemore clearly. I senseda force that could heal wounds and soothe indecision. In the great systemsof syntax I was just beginning to understandand in the faltering poemsI wrote in the last light, I found a temptation to look for a place

110 betweenthe words themselveswhere I could forget girlhood and its longing, forget

the dislocation of a childhood, clothe myself in an old and inherited senseof

possessionand so divide myself from the frailties which so far were all I knew of my

self.' (OL, 81) or `More and more often, I saw how to take the unreasonof one

languageand make it safe in the grammarof another. Languageas exposurebecame

languageas protection.' (OL, 85)

Boland never negatesthe masculine tradition although in collections such as In Her

Own Image and Night Feed and in many of the later poemssuch as `Fever' she uses

language to exposerather than protect - to exposethe wound rather than heal it. In

`Fever' the words andthe voice of the speakerthreaten to break out from the

controlled form. The length of the lines and the discordant soundsthreaten the formal arrangement.This power, Boland suggests,is also linked to the repressed female language:

as if what we lost is a contagion that breaksout in what cannot be shakenout from wordsor beatenout from meaningand survives to weaken

what is given,what is certain andburns away everything but this exact moment of delirium when someonecries out someone'sname. (SP, 77)

111 The female languagehere subvertsthe masculine discoursebut it never replacesit.

The yearning for a different languagein poems suchas `Fever' or `The Muse

Mother' is paralleled in Boland's desire to connect with a femalepast or tradition.

Ellen Mahon (72) readsher collection The Journey as a seriesof woman-centred

poemsin which Boland eventually recognisesSappho as `mother.' The persona

/voice in the sequencemakes connectionswith women representedin painting in

`Self-Portrait on a SummerEvening, ' (SP, 72) with her grandmotherin `Fever,' with

her own past self in `The Bottle Garden,' (SP, 80) with the women lace-makersof

the past who literally lost their sight making lace clothes while she metaphorically

searchesfor this `lace,' this feminine aesthetic,this evidenceof women's creativity

in language.(SP, 79)

Like Virginia Woolf, Boland expressesa desire to connectwith other female poets.

In one poem in the sequence`Object Lessons' Boland positions herself as part of a

female poetic continuity not through the connection of languagebut through the

`room' and its `objects.' Boland uses feminine imagery and a romantic construction

of the isolated poet with the room of her own.

I wonderabout you: whetherthe blue abrasions

of daylight,falling as duskacross your page,

makeyou reachfor the lamp. I sometimesthink

I seethat gesture in the way you use language.

And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers

112 driedand fired on the ironstonerim of

the saucerunderneath your cup, are a sign of

a savage,old calligraphy: you will not have it. (OH, 12)

Boland is searchingfor some community, someprocess of which she is a part. There

is a real yearning in the poem for connection and affiliation. The whole sequence

`Object Lessons' focuses on artefactsgiving the poet some connectionwith her past

and the inadequacyand absenceof a languageto convey those connections.

Boland certainly setsherself up as a pioneer:

`As an Irish woman poet I have very little precedent.There were none in the

nineteenth century or early part of the twentieth century. You didn't have a thriving

senseof the witness of the lived life of women poets, and what you did have was a

very compelling and at times oppressiverelationship betweenIrish poetry and the

national tradition. ' (73)

How true is Boland's claim here? Although women have always been writers in the

Irish have large tradition, -a number of anthologists commentedon the unusually have been largely number of women who wrote in Gaelic - many of those writers erasedby mainstreamanthologies. Because of the influence of Gaelic, there is

certainly a lack of Anglo-Irish women poets for Boland to connect with. Meaney,

(74) however, criticises her for not looking very hard for her literary foremothers.

She notes her dismissive comment on Emily Lawless in A Kind of Scar and calls on

113 Boland's own involvement with Arlen House, responsiblefor republishing the work

of many Irish writers. Referring to A. A. Kelly's anthology of Irish woman poets,

(75) sheattacks Boland in A Kind of Scar for coming close to deferenceto the cult of

the great man, the poetic personality, a deferencethat she arguesfeminist critics such

as Gilbert and Gubar were also guilty of. Many of the poets publishedin Kelly

participate in the construction of the myth of mother Ireland and so would not be

seenby Boland as natural literary foremothers.Nevertheless, Boland here could be

seenas close to Bloom's paradigm and Gilbert and Gubar's development of it in

relation to women poets in No Man's Land. (76). Dowson, (77) however, in her

discussion of contemporarywomen poets and the female affiliation complex

advocatesBoland as a model in her specifically female negotiation with male

tradition. She seesBoland as representinga fourth line of artistic development

against the three lines offered by Freudian psycho sexual models- namely aesthetic

frigidity, assuminga masculine identity and writing as a man, or identifying herself

as feminine. Drawing on Boland's plundering and appropriation of the male traditions and forms she seesthis as a common aestheticin women's poetry which needs to be theorised if women are to identify themselveswith one another.

Dowson's main concern in her essayis to avoid the pattern of the last three hundred years where women publish but disappearto subsequentgenerations, a pattern which is present in Irish women's writing.

The importanceof constructinga matrilineagehas been a key aspectof feminist studiesboth in Westernfeminism and also in non-Westernand Gaelic cultures in terms of an oral tradition. It is to an oral tradition that Boland looks for women's narratives and in this she is closer to non-Westerncultures. The importance of the

114 oral tradition and its connectionwith a female continuity is explored in `What we

Lost. ' (OH, 43) This poem createsa female domesticworld in which the woman who is the poet/persona'smaternal grandmothertells a story to a child - the poet's mother- as shemends linen in the kitchen:

Believe it, what we lost is here in this room on this veiled evening.

The woman finishes. The story ends.

The child,who is my mother,gets up, movesaway.

The woman's story, the poet's maternal history is lost and through the imagery of interiors/garmentsetc. the world of the feminine contained in the objects - they

`talk. ' Similarly `The Photograph on my father's desk' (OH, 37) uncoversthe silence of the poet/persona'smother or paternal grandmother.The silence of the women is expressedthrough the metaphor of a wound:

The woman holdsher throatlike a wound

These images of pain, scarsand wounds recur throughout the sequence.The poet does not want to heal them by falsification or myth. This is what the Irish poetic tradition has done to the body of women and the poet. In a critique of post-colonial revisions of Irish literature she asserts:

115 `In the searchfor a wholenessand coherencethat could stand againstthe

fragmentation of colony, this is also a literature that reachedfor inventions that are

all too accuratea mirror of the romanticisms and self-inventions of an oppressor.

This is a literature whose claims to coherencebecame at times - but chiefly in the

retrospectof the critique - an act of self-regardingpower. And, in the process,this is

also a literature that - through iconic imagesand nationalized feminine images- colonized women by exclusion and simplification. ' (78)

As an illustrative example of what such revisions have done to women writers she usesthe example of the revisions of the context of the poem `The Ballad of Art

O'Leary' by the Irish writer Eibhlin Ni Chonaill. This was a powerful oral poem located in a tradition of Irish women lament poets which was transmogrified into a written romantic ballad in part by Irish revivalists who, in order to counter colonial stereotypesof the Irish as brutish and ignorant, translatedit into `a text of marital devotion among noble and high-minded people.' What she is most concernedabout here is the way that a rich oral tradition, a performance rather than a literary art, part formula, part innovation has been translatedby `history' into something else. The meaning of the poem and the representationof the writer have been colonised in a way that erasestheir connectionwith a communal art developedand practisedby women. Boland recognising herself as both subject and object here, searchesfor a way to addressthe silences.

`The silences in which are our beginnings'

One of the most problematic silencesfor Boland in the Irish tradition and particularlythe literatureof the CelticRevival is the editingout of the terrible

116 realities of the great famine. This is one of the points in the poem `The Achill

Woman.' When the young Boland turns from the words of the Achill woman that

evening she is colluding in what Eagleton calls `some sort of national literary

repression.' Eagleton in his discussionof the representationsof the famine notes this

evasion particularly in the writers of the literary revival. Although the non-

representationalform of much of that writing made the depiction of historical

realities of the famine less likely, Eagleton arguesthat there is `something

recalcitrant at its core which defeatsarticulation, some `real' which stubbornly

refusesto be symbolised,nature disrupting history. ' (79) The Irish poetBrendan

Kennellyexplores the literal silenceof the countrysideduring the faminein his poem

`My Dark Fathers' (80):

Upon the headland,the encroachingsea

Left sandthat hardened after tides of Spring,

No dancingfeet disturbedits symmetry

And thosewho loved goodmusic ceased to sing.

As early as The War Horse Boland takeson that trauma but it is in her later poetry that she explores it fully. In Outside History she returns to her favourite classical myth, Ceresand Persephone,another myth that dealswith being between two worlds. This myth has been attractive to many female poets who have revisioned myths as part of a strategyof reclaiming languageand I shall considerMichele

Roberts' treatment of this myth in Chapter 3. In her later poetry the blight of the land and the mother grieving for her lost child become for Boland potent imagesof the famine. In `The Making of an Irish Goddess' the connectionsbetween the myth and

117 the Great Famine of the nineteenth century are made explicit. Unlike Cereswho

went to hell unchanged,eternally young, the speakerof the poem asserts:

But I needtime - flesh my andthat history-

to make the samedescent.

In my body,

neitheryoung now nor fertile,

andwith the marksof childbirth

still on it,

in my gestures- the way I pin my hair to hide the stitched, healedblemish of a scar - must be an accurateinscription of that agony: (OH, 31)

In the woman's face and body can be read her history, individual and social and to reject these signs is to reject one's history, to place value on only one portion, youth, of a woman's life. That `history' refers to Ceres' original grief but it also looks forward to `that agony' later in the poem, the private history of Irish mothers in the time of famine:

118 the failed harvests,

the fieldsrotting to the horizon,

the children devoured by their mothers

whose souls, they would have said,

went straight to hell,

followedby their own.

The famine itself seemsto re-enactthe blight imposedby Ceres' cyclical grieving.

The gesture of the poet/personasearching for her daughter in the distance unites myth and history: `holding up my hand/sickle shaped,to my eyes.' The sickle- shapedcupping of the hand recalls Ceresas the Goddessof harvestsand the anxious peering through the twilight recalls her searchfor Persephone.

To understandwhat Boland is doing here we need to consider her own comments on the relationship between myth and history. In `The Woman The Place The Poet' she exploresthe connectionbetween her own position and `place' now and the women who were the inmates of the nineteenth-centuryworkhouse, managed by her great- grandfather and located some hundred miles away from her presentlocation in the suburbs.Through a literal journey and an exploration of both landscapesshe comes to realise that:

`myth is instructedby history,although the traditionis full of poetswho arguethe oppositewith force andeloquence. In my case,to paraphrasethe myth,I gradually cameto know at what pricemy seasons- my suburb- hadbeen bought. My underworld was a hundred miles southwest.But there,too, the bargainshad been

119 harsh,the outcome a terrible compromise. The woman I imagined - if the statistics

are anything to go by - must have lost her children in that underworld,just as I came

to possessmine through the seasonsof my neighbourhood...' (OL, 174)

This seemsto me an important connectionand one which is crucial to feminist

theorising on difference. As women our histories are not parallel but interconnected.

Boland recognisesthat her identity in the presentis one located by relations of

hierarchy and power in the past. Her connectionto these women is not as Neil

Sullivan (81) suggestsa `mystical' one but an informed political one. She is not

universalising women but using the myth as an entry point into exploring the

suffering of women at one particular specific point in Irish history.

The Ceres and Persephonemyth allows her identification/empathy with both

characters-the mother whose intenselove for her daughtersand the daily minutiae of

that passionconnects with Boland's own life as a mother in the suburbs,explored in

such poemsas `Night Feed' (SP, 58) or `Hymn' (SP, 60) and the daughterwho is

between two worlds. Thesetwo worlds are not simply the dual heritagesof post-

colonial Ireland but also the world of the past and her present, the world of the

mother and the world of the poet:

leaving something behind, bringing

I haveleft behind somethingwith me should ...

Bolandis alsothe daughterPersephone who oncehaving moved into anotherworld

realisesthe impossibility of going back to that pure and authentic state.

120 The ambivalenceof this loss is what Boland explores from the perspectiveof a

woman in post-colonial Ireland. In `The Mother Tongue' shewrites:

I was born on this side of the Pale.

I speakwith the forked tongue of colony.

But I stand in the first dark and frost

of a winter night in Dublin and imagine

my pure sound, my undivided speech

travelling to the edge of this silence.

As if to find me. And I listen: I hear

what I am safefrom. WhatI havelost. (LL, 30)

She cannot go back to what shewas despitethe seductivenessof a myth of origin;

there can be no return to the old imagesand symbols, to the grieving mother Ireland.

The underworld / the darknesscan be seenin nationalist imagery to representthe

British but it is now part of her seasons-part of her history. This myth then connects

Boland's presentlife in the suburbswith her political and social history; with the

Irish famine and the women who suffered permanentloss of children, the women in the Clonmel workhouse whose stories do not exist in the poetic tradition.

In `The Lost Land' sequenceof poemsshe makesthe connections much more explicit. In the title poem she moves from personalreflection on her own daughters' absenceto the emigrant ships of the past, where women left those they loved in order

121 to survive.The referencesto the underworldconnect the migrationwith Boland's

feelings about her daughtersthrough the referenceto Ceresand Persephone.The

point where myth and history meet is in her present:

I imaginemyself

at the landwardrail of thatboat

searchingfor the last sight of a hand.

I seemyself

on the underworld side of that water,

the darknesscoming in fast, saying

all the namesI knew for a lost land:

Ireland Absence. Daughter. (LL, 37-38)

Out of Myth Into History?

In her 1990 sequence`Outside History' Boland writes:

I have chosen:

out of myth into history I move to be part of that ordeal whose darknessis

only now reaching me from those fields,

122 thoserivers, those roads clotted as

firmamentswith the dead.(OH, 45)

Meaney argues,however, that in not taking into account differences such as class,

material resourcesetc. she universaliseswomen and so does end up mythologising

and dehistoricising them. Indeed the connecting factor is often motherhood as in the

discussed.She poems relatesBoland to Kristeva's concept of woman's time -cyclical

time and monumental time as bearing a special relationship with feminine

subjectivity. She arguesthat although Boland's poetry sets out to confront the events

of history, the `humantruths of survival and humiliation, ' that confrontation is

`framed and to some degreeundercut by the insistenceon women's experienceas

having, in every place and time some common factor. `Womanhood' in this

formulation transcendshistory' (82)

This is a fair criticism but we needto recogniseBoland's senseof connection here.

Her private feelings and experiencesas a mother are what allow her to make a

connection with the women of the famine; the point at which her personalexperience

intersectswith her historical consciousnessis the point of entry to her experiencein

the poem. This is her legacy from Yeats. Although she is critical of him for what she

saw as his gender conservatismin the political poem, she admired Yeats for his way of putting his private experiencesand feelings into the political poem. Like Yeats, she does not want to remain omniscient, outside the poem, an observer:

`I do not believe the political poem can be written with truth and effect unless the self who writesthat poem-a self in which sexualitymust be a factor - is seento be

123 in a radical relation to the ratio of power to powerlessnesswith which the political

poem is so concerned. This relation, and the way it is construed,are now visibly

altered in the Irish poem. One of the characteristicsof the political poem - the

accruing of power by the speakerin the poem in the face of a perceived

downright level, powerlessnessoutside it - has been subverted. At a and sensible the

senseof power a woman might have in an Irish poem today will not just be political;

it must also be politicized. In other words, her senseof power inside the poem must

be flawed and temperednot just by a perception of powerlessnessoutside it but also

by the memory of her traditional and objectified silence within it. ' (OL, 185-186)

Boland is aware of the interconnectionsof her world with the women in the Clonmel

workhouse. As a mother she has a keen senseof the meaning of a loss of a child.

Boland does specifically addressdifferences between women in her later poems.In

her collection In a Time of Violencedifferences of classand material position as they

intersect with race are explored in the poem `March 1 1847. By the First Post':

Our by ... picnics the river - remember that one with Major Harris? - our outings to the opera

& our teas

are over nowfor the time being.

Shall I tell you what I saw on Friday, driving with Mama? A woman lying across the Kells Road with her baby - in full view. Wehad to go

124 out of our way

to get home & we were late

& poor Mama was not herself all day. (17V, 7)

`In a bad light' parallels the Irish seamstresseswho lost their sight so that other

women could emigrate in `dressesmade of French silk. ' The narrator is reminded of

this by the artefact of a doll in a museumdressed in such `finery. ' What is not there

in this artefact is the suffering of the Irish seamstresses:

We are sewinga last sightof shore. We aresewing

coffin ships, and the salt of exile. And our own death in it. For history's doing this. And this (ITV, 8) abandonmentwe are ...

Thereis a connectionin thesewomen's histories, their storiesinterweave as do their fatesbut they areunaware of this relationship.

Her later poetry such asIn A Time Of Violence,her 1994 collection and The Lost

Land, published in 1999, are much more concernedwith the political and social upheavalsof the last two centuriesin Ireland. They could be read as part of her move from myth to history. Although more outwardly political and `public' volumes, the poemsstill take the personalas a point of entry where the poet /persona is trying to make a connectionwith her past through some feeling or event in the present. Boland returns to the famine of the nineteenth-centuryand its effects as a way of realigning or recastingthe metaphor betweenthe defeatsof a nation and the truths of womanhood and of honouring the story of the Achill Woman erasedby the

125 Irish poetictradition. The first poemin the collectionIn A TimeOf Violenceis called

`That the scienceof Cartography is Limited'

- and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam, the gloomof cypresses is what I wish to prove. (ITV, 5)

The poem dealswith what maps eraseand representin historical as well as geographicalterms-the power relations and the suffering that went into the demarking of boundaries.What maps eraseand smooth over is a theme taken up by other contemporaryIrish writers most notably by Friel in his play Translations. (83)

The poem makesa sharppolitical point, the contribution of the British to the death

famine, is into by toll of the but does so in a gentle way - the reader eased the poem the positioning of the poet/personaand their personalevocation of loss:

When you and I were first in love we drove to the borders of Connact andentered a wood there.

Look down you said:this wasonce a famineroad.

This is the power of Boland's poetry -to lead the reader in gently yet the senseof grief for whatis lost/ hasnever been lingers and haunts the reader.Despite this gentle and seductiveentry into the poem Boland's depiction of the famine is

126 politically radical. Shedepicts it as a matter of economic and political relations

rather than simply a catastropheof nature:

in the secondwinter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,

Relief Committees gave

the starving Irish suchroads to build.

Wherethey died,there the roadended

Manyaccounts of the faminein history,from Irish writersas well asBritish, have

ignoredthe socialcauses and focused on it asan actof natureand in somecases an

actof God.Boland does not colludein this. As Eagletonand others have recently

noted`the hiatus in the 1847relief operation...sent many to their graves.' (84)

The dispossessionand displacementcaused by the remaking of the map of Ireland is an idea that recurs throughout her later poetry. In `In which the ancient history/ I

learn is not my own' the poet/personais a schoolgirl in England in the 50s learning an imperialist history and geography.Suddenly the schoolgirl has an urge to find her history and to speakout loud the soundsof the place-names:

Suddenly

I wanted to standin front of it.

127 I wantedto traceover

andover the weaveof my own country.

To read out names

I was close to forgetting.

Wicklow. Kilruddy. Dublin.

She revisits this idea in `The Colonists' from her collection The Lost Land. The

vision shesees is imagesof dispossession- the erasureof identitycreated by the colonistsremaking of the mapsand their renaming.What is most significanthere is

the effectthis imageof the pasthas on hersense of identityand its fragility in the

present:

Thenthey faded

And the truth is I neversaw them.

If I hadI would havedriven home throughan ordinaryevening, knowing that not one street name or sign or neighbourhood

couldbe trusted to the safe-keeping of the making and unmaking of a people. (LL, 25-26)

Althoughthese later collectionsare concerned much more directly with the legacyof

British imperialism in Ireland, the `violence' referred to in the title of the 1994 collection is as much to do with the violence done to women in the Irish poetic

128 tradition as the nineteenth-centuryfamine and conflict. The `maps' of the text which

eraseIrish history can also be read as the map of poetry on which women poets are

not found. Irish women have beenvictims of a political and economicpower game

but they have also been victims of a linguistic one and the poet recognisesthe

seductionof this linguistic violation. In `Beautiful Speech'the poet/personalooks

back reflexively on her early lyric poetry and the way she learned the rhetoric of an

`oppressor'slanguage. ' The temptation of using words to occlude and to obscureand

the shadow side of languageis connectedto the way the languageand texts of the

powerful, both coloniser and nationalist, disguisethe reality:

imagine words such as hate

and territory and the like - unbanishedstill as they always would be - wait

andare waiting under

beautiful speech. To strike. (IT, 13)

Diaspora Identification: Boland's Imagined Communities.

Although Boland takesthe Great Famine and the colonisation of the Irish by the

British as themeshere, the violence done to women by the reduction of their human agency is not limited to one group or nation. This is suggestedby her use of classical and Irish myth and her referencesto Europe. For examplethe disenfranchisedand the dispossessedappear in suchpoems as `The Huguenot Graveyardat the heart of the city. ' Boland makes connectionswith individuals and groups who connectwith her own senseof loss. It is through languagethat this connection is made sometimes shadowy as in `In Exile' (OH, 40) sometimesmore directly as in `Huguenot':

129 Say: had We ... they another once. And think of them as they first heardof us:

huddled around candlesand words failing as

the stubborn tongue of the South put

oo and an to the soundsof Dublin,

and of their silver fingers at the window-sill

in the full moonas they leanedout

to breathethe sweet air of Nimes

for the last time (ITV, 31) ...

Exile and displacement are centralthemes in Boland's most recent collection, The

Lost Land. The encounter betweendifferent realmswhich shapesthis collection is

that betweenpast and present. Somecritics suchas Aijaz Ahmad have contestedthe use of `post' in post-colonialism stressing`the articulations between and acrossthe politically defined historical periods, of pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence cultures.' (85) This connection can be seenin Boland's poem sequence`Colony'.

The aftermath of Colony and in particular the psychic legacy of colonisation on those who come after is the focus of the poems in this sequence.In `Daughtersof

Colony' the poet/personaagain connectsto the women of the past, dispossessedand uncertain of where they belonged:

I put my wordsbetween them

130 andthe silence

the failing light has consignedthem to:

I also am a daughter of the colony.

I sharetheir brokenspeech, there other-whereness.

No testamentor craft of mine can hide

our presence

on the distaff sideof history.

See:they pull the brims of their hats down against a gust from the harbour.

They cover their faceswith what shouldhave been and never quite was: their home. (LL, 16-17)

This poem, like others in the collection, dealswith the emigration which has so depletedIreland's population at points in its history and created a significant Irish diaspora.In her concern with this she moves away from the construct of nation as limited `territory' to envisagea more global `imagined community' from the past as well as the present. Sheenvisages herself as part of this wider community.

In these poemsBoland is searching for the `abyss,made out of air, impossible to measure,created of whispers,tears and silences, that is so difficult to manage.' (86)

131 Bolandrefers to this `abyss'as that distancebetween the pastand history. In her

essay`Daughters of Colony' (87) Bolandwarns of the dangersof the post-colonial

revisions of history and literature which don't take accountof the silencesof the past.

Like Cixous, Boland views languageas compensationfor and a meansof living and

inscribing loss. In `From the Sceneof the Unconsciousto the Sceneof History'

Cixous writes: `At a certain moment for the personwho has lost everything, whether that is, moreover, a being or country, languagebecomes the country. One entersthe country of languages.' (88) The poemsin this sequenceexpress loss of different kinds - the personatakes on the exile and suffering of the past even in her dreams and visions. She is haunted by the past, the `human pain' and the `ghostly weeping.'

All she can do is `put (her) words betweenthem/ and the silence.' In `A Habitable

Grief' she writes:

This is what languageis: a habitable grief. A turn of speech for the everyday and ordinary abrasion of lossessuch as this:

which hurts just enough to be a scar.

And healsjust enoughto be a nation.

132 Unlike many women poets writing in Ireland today, from both sidesof the divide,

Boland still feels the needto engageas a woman with the idea of nation. Her poetic

development has been a processof decolonisation-ofcasting off the `set text' of

poetry from both the colonisers,the English, and from the Nationalists, the Irish,

who have colonised women by exclusion and simplification. Boland's quest as a

writer has been to find a form and a languagein which she has both a sex and a state,

and in this way to recast the concept of what it meansto be an Irish woman living in

a post-colonial country in a global age.Her poetry while recognising the specifics of

Ireland's past and trying to find a languageto explore this, avoids neo-nationalistand

insular rhetoric. By taking as poetic models not only Irish and British poets but

Russian models such as Akhmatova and American models such as Plath and Rich

(89) Boland writes from an internationalist perspectivebut one that recognisesand

engageswith the specific constructswhich have shapedher. Her concernwith a

particularly female diasporaalso gives her a different senseof an imagined

community. It offers a basis on which to reassessnational identity as exclusive and

absolute-belongingto genealogyor geographyand to imagine a more complex

based indeterminacy interaction In The Lost Land account on contingency, and .

Boland displays what might be termed a diasporaconsciousness. Although writing in

Ireland her senseof connectionwith those women who were forced to emigrate, her own experienceof an Irish childhood in England, and her own senseof exclusion from Irish history give her this consciousnessof being part of a wider displaced community. Although she recognisesthe attractions of a fixed unified identity-the

be for identification contrary passionto whole -she ultimately rejects this with the spacesin-between. Her poetry arisesfrom a seriesof encountersbetween different realms: British and Irish, public and private, east and west, town and country,

133 woman and poet and past and present.In this way her reconfigured nation is one

basedon continual movementrather than the fixed poetics of soil and blood. In its

emphasison the effect of the past on the present,Boland's poetry also asserts

Bhabha's claim that the presentcan no longer be envisagedas a break or a bonding

with the past or future: Boland's work can be seenas representativeof what Bhabha

calls the `borderline work of culture.' `Such art doesnot merely recall the past as

social causeor aestheticprecedent; it renewsthe past, refiguring it as a contingent

`in-between' space,that innovatesand interrupts the performanceof the present.The

past-presentbecomes part of the necessity,not the nostalgia,of living. ' (90)

As Boland puts it in `Witness':

Out of my mouth they come:

The spurredand booted garrisons.

The menand women

they dispossessed.

What is a colony if not the brutaltruth thatwhen we speak the gravesopen.

And the deadwalk?

134 Notes

1. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1938 and 1952),

p. 197.

2. Eavan Boland, `OutsideHistory' in Object Lessons (London: Vintage, 1996),

p. 147; hereafterOL. All further referenceswill be in the text. This essayfirst

appearedas a LIP pamplet called A Kind of Scar: The WomanPoet in a National

Tradition. (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989.)

3. EavanBoland, `The Achill Woman', OutsideHistory (Manchester:Carcanet,

1990);hereafter OH. All further referencesto this collectionwill be in the text.

4. Homi Bhabha,`Signs taken for wonders'in Critical Inquiry 12,1, (1985).

5. Edna Longley, `From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands' in The

Living Strewn (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1984), p. 188.

6. Ann Owen Weekes, `An Origin like Water: The Poetry of Eavan Boland and

Modernist Critiques of Irish Literature. ' in Bucknell Review 38,1, (1994) pp. 159-

175.

7. Jody Allen-Randolph, `An interview with EavanBoland' in P. N Review, 21,1

(1993), pp. 52-57.

8. Thomas Kinsella, The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse(Oxford, O. U. P., 1986), p.

xxvii.

9. EavanBoland, `The Mother Tongue', The Lost Land (Manchester:Carcanet,

1998); hereafterLL. All further referencesto this collection will be in the text.

10. Mairtin Mac an Ghail, ContemporaryRacisms and Ethnicities (Buckingham:

Open University Press, 1999), p. 10

11. SabinaSharkey, `A view of the presentstate of Irish Studies' in SusanBassnett,

(ed.) Studying British cultures (London: Routledge, 1997),pp. 113-134.

135 12. Ania Loomba, `The Colour of Patriarchy: Critical Difference, Cultural

Difference and RenaissanceDrama' in Woman, `Race'and Writing in the Early

Modern Period edited by M. Hendricks and P. Parker (London: Routledge, 1994).

13. Beddoes' index of Nigrescenceis cited in J.F. Szwed, `Raceand the embodiment

of culture' in Ethnicity, 2 (1975), pp. 19-33.

14. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation,

Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti Racist Struggle (London: Routledge, 1993).

15. EavanBoland, `Mise Eire', SelectedPoems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989);

hereafterSP. All further referencesto this collection will be in the text.

16. JamesJoyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan. (London: Penguin, 1976),

p. 189.

17. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998).

18. Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists, (London: Virago, 1993),p. 104.

19. Margaret Ward, UnmanageableRevolutionaries: Womanand Irish Nationalism

(London: Pluto Press, 1983).

20. Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland (Dublin, 1925).

21. SeamusHeaney, `Act of Union, ' North (London: Faber, 1975), p.49-50.

22. SabinaSharkey, IreAz d and the Iconographyof Rape. Irish StudiesCentre

OccasionalPaper Series no. 5. (London:University of North LondonPress, 1992).

23. Padraig Pearse,`I am Ireland,' The Penguin Book of Irish Verse.Ed. by Brendan

Kennelly, (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1981),p. 295.

24. Longley, The Living Stream p. 189.

25. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1992).

26. A. NormanJeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982).

136 27. Gerardine Meaney, `Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity: Eavan

Boland and Irish Women's Writing' in Women:a cultural review, 4,2 (1993) pp.

136-153 (141).

28. Homi Bhabha, TheLocation of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994.), p. 37.

29. ibid., p. 5.

30. ibid. p. 4.

31. Helene Cixous, `Coming to Writing' trans. by Deborah Jensenin 'Coming to

Writing' and Other Essays(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991),p. 2.

32. Terry Eagleton,Heathcl f and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995),p. 16.

33. GerardineMeaney, Sex and Nation: Womenin Irish Culture and Politics

(Dublin: Attic Press,LIP pamphlet, 1991).

34. Homi Bhabha, `The Commitment to Theory' in The Location of Culture, p. 28.

35. EavanBoland, `The Woman Poet: Her Dilemma' in Object Lessons,(London:

Vintage, 1996),pp. 239-254. (Originally published in Stand, Winter, 1986-7, pp. 43-

49.)

36. SarahMaguire, `Dilemmas and Developments:Eavan Boland Re-examined' in

Feminist Review, 62, (1999), pp. 53-66.

37. Cora Kaplan, `Languageand gender' in Deborah Cameron(ed. ), TheFeminist

Critique of Language, (London: Routledge, 1990).

38. Maguire, `Dilemmas and Developments', p. 64.

39. T. S. Eliot, `Preludes', The CompletePoems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London:

Faber and Faber, 1969).

40. T. S.Eliot, `TheLove Songof J. Alfred Prufrock', TheComplete Poems and

Playsof T. S.Eliot.

137 41. SeeHomi Bhabha, `Bombs away in Suburbia' in Roger Silverstone(ed. ),

Visionsof Suburbia (London: Routledge, 1997) where Bhabha talks of the culture

war going on that seeksto `suburbanise'the soul of America - traditional and

conservative embodiedfor Bhabha in the rhetoric of politicians suchas Newt

Gingrich and Bob Dole.

42. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. p. 5.

43. Anne Sexton, Transformations(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

44. T. S. Eliot, `Preludes', The CompletePoems and Plays of T S. Eliot, p. 22.

45. Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1982).

46. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus,

1965), p. 211.

47. T. S. Eliot, `The Waste Land', The CompletePoems and Plays of T. S. Eliot.

48. John Betjeman, Collected Poems(London: John Murray, 1970), p. 24.

49. Various artists, The Soundof the Suburbs (Sony Music (UK) Ltd., 1982).

50. Andy Medhurst, `Negotiating the Gnome Zone: Versions of Suburbiain British

Popular Culture' in Roger Silverstone(ed. ), Visions of Suburbia (Routledge:

London, 1997), p. 241.

51. PaulOliver, Dunroamin:The Suburban Semi and its enemies,(London: Barrie andJenkins, 1981).

52. Ann Owen Weekes, `An Origin like Water': The Poetry of Eavan Boland and

Modernist Critiques of Irish Literature' in Bucknell Review38,1, (1994) pp. 159-

175.

53. Randolph,`An Interviewwith EavanBoland'.

54. Marilyn French, The Women'sRoom (London: Andre Deutch, 1978).

138 55. SusanBordo, `Anorexia nervosa:psychopathology as the crystallization of

culture' in Knowing Womenedited by Crowley and Himmelweit (Cambridge: Polity,

1992), pp. 90-109.

56. Jody Allen-Randolph, `Ecriture Feminine and the Authorship of Self in Eavan

Boland's In Her Own Image,' Colby Quarterly, 27,1(1991) pp. 48-59.

57. Ellmann, The Hunger Artists.

58. ibid., p. 2.

59. Randolph, `Ecriture Feminine and the Authorship of Self.

60. Ailbhe Smith, `Dodging round the Grand Piano' in Kicking Daffodils edited by

Vicki Bertram (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1997), pp. 57-84.

61. ibid., pp. 77-78.

62. PeterReading, Review of SelectedPoems, Sunday Times, 110'June, 1989, p. 14.

63. Adrienne Rich, Of WomanBorn (London: Virago, 1977),p. 36.

64. Philip Larkin, `Afternoons', The Whitsun Weddings(London: Faber and Faber,

1964), p. 44.

65. Randolph, `An Interview with Eavan Boland'.

66. Vicki Bertram, Muscling In. UnpublishedThesis, University of York, 1992.

67. Paul Muldoon, `Aisling', Quoof (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 39.

68. Longley, The Living Stream p. 173-195.

69. Randolph, `An Interview with Eavan Boland'.

70. T. S. Eliot, `Tradition and the Individual Talent' in SelectedEssays (London:

Faber and Faber, 1951),pp. 13-22.

71. She was one of only three women poets to be included in the controversialField

Day Anthology of Irish writing.

139 72. Ellen M. Mahon, `EavanBoland's Journeywith the Muse' in Learning the

Trade: Essayson W. B. Yeatsand ContemporaryPoetry, edited by DeborahFleming

(West Cornwall, Conn: Locust Hill Press, 1993), pp. 179-194.

73. Marilyn Reizbaum, `An Interview with Eavan Boland' ContemporaryLiterature,

30 (1989), pp. 471-79.

74. Gerardine Meaney, `Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity: Eavan

Boland and Irish Women's Writing'p. 144.

75. A. A. Kelly, Pillars of the House: An Anthology of Verseby Irish Womenfrom

1690 to the Present (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1987).

76. Gilbert and Gubar argue that with the establishmentof a women's tradition or

canon women writers are now experiencinganxiety about powerful literary mothers

which producesan `affiliation complex.' In the Freudian psychic model the `normal'

path of psychic development for a girl is to reject the mother and turn to the father as

sourceof power and authority. In the past women had to affiliate with a patriarchal literary tradition. The arrival of powerful literary mothers on the scenenot only suggestsfor the first time the vulnerability of the once great literary fathers, but also anxiety about the possiblecastrating power of the mother.

77. JaneDowson, `Older SistersAre Very SoberingThings' in Feminist Review,62,

(1999), pp. 6-20.

78. Eavan Boland, `Daughtersof Colony: A PersonalInterpretation of the place of

Gender Issuesin the Postcolonial Interpretation of Irish Literature.' in Eire Ireland,

37,2-3 (1997), pp. 9-20 (20).

79. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliffand the Great Hunger p. 14.

80. Brenden Kennelly, `My Dark Fathers' in The Oxford Book of Irish Verse

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958),pp. 353-354.

140 81. Neil Sullivan, `Righting Irish Poetry: Eavan Boland's Revisionary Struggle,' in

Colby Quarterly, 33,4 (1997).

82. Meaney, `Myth, History and the Politics of Subjectivity' p. 142.

83. Brian Friel, `Translations' in SelectedPlays, (London: Faber and Faber, 1984).

84. Terry Eagleton, Heathclf and the Great Hunger p. 24.

85. Aijaz Ahmed, `The politics of literary postcoloniality', Race and Class 36,3 (1995).

86. Eavan Boland, `Daughtersof Colony' pp. 13-14.

87. EavanBoland, ibid.

88. Helene Cixous, `From the Sceneof the Unconsciousto the Sceneof History, ' translatedby Deborah Carpenter,in The Future of Literary History, edited by Ralph

Cohen, (London: Routledge, 1989),p. 19.

89. Boland writes of her admiration for Rich and her influence in severalpieces. See, for example, Deborah McWilliams Consalvo, `An Interview with Eavan Boland' in

Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review of Letters, 81, (1992) pp. 89-100.

90. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture p. 7.

141 Chapter 3.

Michele Roberts: Healing the Splits

In MicheleRoberts' 1992 novel Daughters of theHouse there is a pointat which the

teenageLeonie travelling with her motheracross the Channelfrom Englandto

France feels the two parts of herself and her dual identity connect:

`For as they left England so they left the English languagebehind. Familiar words

dissolved, into words and salt spray, ploughed back into foam, the cold dark seain whose bottomlessdepths monsters swam, of no known nationality. Halfway across,

as the Channel becameLa Manche, languagereassembled itself, rose from the waves and becameFrench. While Madeleine snoredin the bottom bunk Leonie fought to keep awake, to know the exact moment when, in the very centre of the Channel, precisely equidistant from both shores,the walls of water and of words met, embracedwetly and closely, becameeach other, composedof eachother's sounds.

For at that moment true languagewas restoredto her. Independentof separated words, as whole as water, it bore her along as a part of itself, a gold current that connected everything, a secret river running underground,the deepwell, the source of life, a flood driving through her, salty breakeron her own beach,streams of words and non- words, voices calling out which were staccato,echoing, which promised bliss. Then the boat churned on. It abandonedEnglish and advancedinto French.' (1)

Like Roberts, Leonie is, or believesherself to be at this point in the narrative, of dual identity, both English and French. Also like Roberts she splits her early life between

142 both countries. The description here of the moment of connectionwhen `true

language' is restored to her is a moment of unity, of wholenesswhen instead of

being either English or French she is at that moment both. The moment does not last.

When she disembarksthe next morning and climbs into her uncle's car she feels like

a `foreigner' once more.

This desire for total integration, for unity and connectionthat Leonie momentarily

feels hereis fundamentalto Roberts' writing. The reconciliation of Roberts' own

French and English identities and languages,I would argue,is central to all other

desire for connection and reconciliation in her work. This desire to integrate both

sides of herself, her French side and her English side, often manifestsitself in a

desire to expressboth the masculineand the repressedfeminine in language.In

Roberts' description of the moment halfway acrossthe channelwhen the walls of

water and of words meet we have an echo of Kristeva's semiotic, (2) the moment

when the lost mother is restoredto language.That moment occurs again in the novel

but in even stronger Kristevan imagery. After the death of her aunt, Leonie seesa

vision of a red and gold madonna:

`Something was restoredto her which she had lost and believed shewould never find

again. The deepestpleasure she had ever known possessedher. It startedin her toes and acrossher shouldersand squirmedthrough her, aching, sweet.

Then she rememberedit. A languageshe once knew but had forgotten about, forgotten ever hearing, forgotten she could speak.Deeper than English or French; not foreign; her own... The secret language,the underground streamthat forced through her like a river, that rose and dancedinside her like the pulling jet of a

143 fountain, that wetted her face and hands like fine spray, that joined her back to what

she had lost, to something she had once intimately known, that she could hardly

believe would always be there as it was now, which waited for her and called her by

her name.' This moment also does not last. `Time stilled, and suspendeditself. In the

cool drizzle. Then, with a jerk, the world went on again.' (Daughters, p.86)

The momentsare representedin similar imageslinking, I would argue,both the

reconciliation of Leone's French and English identities with the senseof fullness

and jouissance that she experiencesas she connectswith the lost maternal.Both are

moments when her full self is given expression,when she is not estrangedfrom one

languageand one part of herself. The Channel/La Manche comesto representfor the

characterhere not just ajourney outwards but also a journey inwards to the watery

depthsof the unconsciousand the pre-oedipal,to the repressedand foreign parts of

oneself. The Channel connectsnot just two different countries and cultures but two

heritages,two spheres,both important parts of Leone's identity.

For Michele Roberts, also, both theseheritages are important. Roberts is the

daughterof a French Catholic mother and an English Protestantfather. She grew up

in a north London suburb but spent periods of her childhood in Normandy with her

mother's family and her education and girlhood were deeply influenced by her mother's French Catholicism. She has continued to spendtime in both cultures and now lives in the Mayenne while spending periodsof time in England. She has thus continued to split her life betweenFrance and England. All of her writing engages with thesetwo places. Both France and England are present in her novels, poetry and plays as real physical landscapes:Daughters of the House is set in a rural village

144 nearParis, Flesh and Blood movesthrough time and spacefrom England to France

and indeed Italy and Greece.In her first novel A Piece of the Night her heroine, Julie,

moves betweenthe two countries, and in her most recent novel The Looking Glass Etretat, the action takes place around the Normandy home of her maternal family. (3)

Her poemsare harder to pin down in terms of a real physical location, however here

too poemshave their starting point in Mayenne, Paris and the Etretat of her

childhood as well as London and Wales. Just as Roberts has split her life between

France and England, so in her fiction rarely do all the eventsof the novel take place

in one sphere. Charactersmove betweenEngland and France,the channel serving as

a metaphorfor connectionas in the quote from Daughters of the House. In her novel

Fair Exchange, (4) for example, loosely basedon the story of the affair betweenthe

poet William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, cross channellonging and desire

permeatesthe novel. Significantly it is the English Jemimawho becomesthe lover of

a Frenchrevolutionary while French Annette falls for the English poet. Both women

produce daughterswho, like Roberts herself, are both French and English.

It is, however, the symbolic and psychic associationsconnected to the physical

geography of both countries that resonatein her writing. In her collection of short

storiesDuring Mother's Absencethe title of the specifically autobiographical `Une

Glossaire/A Glossary' gesturestowards the idea of the need for translation, the need

to carry oneself across,to find a way forward in one script of expressingthe `other'

and the lossesthis entails. The first entry in her glossary is significantly `absence'.

The seais invoked again, here representingdeath and obliteration of the memoriesof her early years and her maternal French family: `Into the face of this loss I castmy

145 words, pebblesthrown into the sea.I'm going to write a sort of geography.To

reclaim the past. The waves race backwardsthrough my fingers, and I can't hold onto them. I lick the salt on my hands,and set myself to remembering.' (5) France as representedin this piece is almost presymbolic, a rural and female world of food and plenty. Some of the entries indicate the meaning of Franceand her French heritage for Roberts. The entry for `Francais' reads `French. The French language.My mother's tongue. My mother-tongue,that I take in along with her milk. The language

in France My tongue lapping '(6) The imageshere of my childhood ... at pleasure... and the associationbetween mother's milk and the first languageecho the ideasof

Helene Cixous. (7) Food, a stapleof Roberts' writing, also appearshere frequently in entriesfor `artichauts', `beurre', `camembert', `creme', `pain benie des hommes', all signifying nurture, richness,oral pleasureand sensuality.

Francethen is the realm of the maternal, the imaginary, representedoften in images of the sea, la mer in French having the same sound as the word for mother - la mere.

Here her father is the eternal outsider, l'etranger: `Dad's an Englishman. An outsider,' (8) she writes in the entry under `grandpere', always made to feel like a foreigner. And Roberts although part of this family and community is also an

`outsider': `I'm part of this huge enduring passionatefamily; yet my life in London also makesme an outsider.' (9)

England becomesthe land of the father, the realm of the symbolic, the rational and the modern. Both worlds coexist in Roberts' writing.

The desireto experiencethat momentmidchannel when true languageis restoredto her, when part of herself is not foreign or `etranger' is I would arguecentral to

146 Roberts' writing. This quest for connection, for wholeness,for a way to heal the

splits within ourselvesand culture manifestsitself in different ways which I want to

explore in this chapter. Although my focus hereis on Roberts' poetry, I shall also

make use of her novels and short stories.Even when writing within the convention

of realist fiction, Roberts' style is highly poetic particularly in her use and

developmentof metaphor. Like many other contemporaryfemale writers she crosses

generic boundariesand forms and resists easycategorisation.

Roberts has also had a significant presencewithin the U. K. feminist publishing scene

and more recently in the mainstreamliterary world as a commentatorand reviewer

and has publisheda number of non-fiction essayson literature, art and feminism. In

this she is more French than English. In her engagementwith both theory and

fiction, often experimentingwith form and languagein fiction and poetry to explore

theoretical ideas, Roberts can be seenas part of a French tradition. As Elaine

Showalter recently commented:`Simone de Beauvoir is a groundbreakingnovelist as

well as a theorist, and Kristeva and Cixous have done both as well. ' (10)

This engagementwith theoretical ideas in her fiction and poetry is an areaI want to

explore in this chapter. In her novels Roberts draws on patriarchal texts, in particular

biblical myths and religious narratives. Her poetry too, although less obviously,

engageswith ideas from Freud and Lacan andthe reworkings of Lacan by Helene

Cixous and Julia Kristeva and to a lesserextent Luce Irigaray. It seemsto me that

Roberts' writing is also informed by the writings of Melanie Klein and so I will also

considerthe relevanceof Klein and one of her followers, Donald Winnicott, to a reading of Roberts' texts. Much has been made of the irreconcilable differences

147 between thesetwo strandsof psychoanalysisbut Roberts' writing engageswith both.

One of the difficulties for me as a critic reading Roberts' work is not being sure of

the point at which I am imposing my own theoretical readingson Roberts' work and

how much as a novelist or poet sheconsciously engageswith such work. Although

this is not unique to Roberts' work, her conspicuousengagement with theory makes

the boundary betweenwriter and critic less clear. I have therefore drawn on some of

her essaysabout her own writing practice to illuminate this distinction. However,

perhapssuch a distinction itself is problematic as Roberts' creative work is about

breaking down clear cut distinctions between self and other and valuing loss of

boundariesover clarity and ownership; her use of intertextuality in her work can be

read in this way.

Kristevadefines intertextuality as the `transpositionof one(or several)sign

system(s)into another' She assertsthat suchtransposition:

`specifiesthat the passagefrom one signifying systemto anotherdemands a new

articulation of the thetic - of enunciative and denotative positionality. If one grants

that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying

systems(an intertextuality), one then understandsthat its `place' of enunciationand

its denoted `object' are never single, complete and identical to themselves,but

always plural, shattered,capable of being tabulated.' (11)

Kristevaalso asserts that texts also include the text of the writer's unconscious.Such

intertextuality,I would suggest,can be seenas part of Roberts'strategy to dissolve boundariesand to heal the split betweenliterature or creativeactivity and theory.

148 Roberts herself has written of the needto reconcilethis split. In an article published

in 1979 Roberts explores the relationship betweenwriting fiction and poetry and the

politics of the women's movement. One of her key concernshere and one which is a

constant theme in her essaysis the difficulty of writing about art in a language

systemwhich privileges logic or theory; that which is `not art':

` I think in different different level from theory, ... that art works a way and on a

neither replacing it or being replacedby it. Yet, traditionally, peopletrying to explain

this are forced to do so in ways sanctionedby theory: the rigorous application of

concepts,the advancementand testing of a thesis in ways seento be `scientific,'

`objective,' or `rational'. Western philosophy generally has suffered from an

imposed split betweenthe object of knowledge and the knower of it. This manifests

itself, for example, in the division that is felt to exist betweenscientific observers

and the teemingchaotic world they survey from the heights of their knowledge and

then subdueinto order through the application of their concepts.Nothing which

cannot be tested in the laboratory or through logic exists. This - conveniently -

eliminates a massof troublesomethings like feelings and relationships,things which

occur between peopleand are not isolated items.' (12)

Roberts seesliterature and art as essentialto a feminist politics becauseit is

concernedwith conflict; with what is `between.' Drawing on the ideas of Freud and

Althusser she argues that `conflict' is central to changeand to seriousart. Roberts

also draws parallels betweenwomen and art in terms of their construction in patriarchy. Art has traditionally been seenas `not-theory, as not-science,as not-true' and this hasgiven it a certain freedom. Women have beenlabelled as `not-men,as

149 not-actors,as not- rational'and as suchhave both been able and forced to explore

being emotional, intuitive, loving and supportive. Both women and art, she argues,

are equatedwith the unconsciousin male displacement.

Roberts' ideashere echo Irigaray's analysis of the position of woman within culture.

Irigaray arguesthat since patriarchal men are still unconsciously mergedwith the

mother they have projected onto women all that they need to deny in themselvesin

order to protect themselvesfrom conscious awarenessof this continuing dependence

on the female. One of the effects of this is the over- valorisation of logic and reason

which is privileged in the symbolic. Irigaray arguesthat women must use their

creativity to construct a new female imaginary which has the potential to transform

the symbolic. She envisions the transformation of existing structuresof thought

through the presenceof two imaginaries;one related to the mother and women as

themselvesand a transformed male imaginary no longer dependenton projection

onto the female. In a similar way Roberts advocatesa `double syntax.'(13)

`...Where consciousthought strives for utter clarity, unconsciousthought relies on

ambiguity, opacity, mystery. Literature playing with both modes,not only reveals

contradictions through its content but begins to heal splits through its structure and

devices.' (14) These ideasare given concreteexpression in Roberts' poetry. The

poemsare full of `serious' and iconoclastic referencesto religion, myth, literature and play intertextually with psychoanalysis.Yet the poemsdo not work on an abstractintellectual level; they are groundedin feeling and the physical world. To

`read' them we needto surrenderourselves to her surreal landscapes,her rhythm and her celebration of the sensual.Roberts explores in her poetry the interconnectedness

150 of everything.Metaphor, sound, unusual juxtapositions all combineoften in a

surrealist excessofjouissance.

Here is the poem `praiseblue. ' The social world of the poem is a market stall in Italy

but in her description the colour blue signifies a variety of sensualexperiences and

desireswhich the speakerdoesn't separate herself from but mergesand surrenders

herselfto:

Blue torrent of plastic crates

underthe marketstalls

of Sant' Ambrogio.

Blue swollen and tight

as aubergine skins: rain

of shinytruncheons.

Blue bursts in my mouth: juice avalancheof trays of muscat grapes.

Blue mountains of dusky plums patchedwith black. Sweetbruises fat as eggs.

Blue shootsoff in all directions:

151 violet tips of creamturnips mauveasters and radicchio frills.

My blue cotton dresswith white spots,my navy espadrilles let me fit in.

The sky wraps it up.

Ink shadowsunder the eaves at noon.I dissolvein blue

with just one cigarette called MS Blu its blue steamwrithing. (15)

This dissolution of boundaries,this loss of self, is not seenas threateningto the subject of the poem, rather it is an ecstasy,a sublime loss. The sexualimagery of the

is female here in but poem not new - plums as genitals pop up and there western art- it is the connotationsof both the male body `rain of shiny truncheons' and `Blue shootsoff in all directions: violet tips of creamturnips' andthe female body: `Blue mountain of dusky plums/patchedwith black' which are unusual in a poem. Male and female sexuality are celebratedand mergewith the natural and vegetableworld.

The poem is almost orgasmic in its celebration of the sensesand the loss of control and self ending with the post-coital cigarette `its blue steam writhing. ' Yet there is

152 somereturn to the socialand symbolic. Her bluedress and her navy espadrilles `let

me fit in'.

The celebration of the sensual/physicalworld through a hymn of praise to the colour

blue illustrates another split that Roberts is concernedto heal, that of the religious

and secular. Roberts grew up steepedin her mother's French Catholicism and it has

had a profound influence on her writing. I will discussthis aspectof her work in

more detail later in the chapter but it is significant that blue is the colour most

associatedin Catholic iconography with the ideal feminine, the virgin Mary, the

antithesis of the material and sexualworld. In Roberts' short story `Charity' the

female narrator says `God has no colour becauseHe's an invisible spirit, but

everything connectedwith Our Lady is blue. ' (16) In Roberts' hymn of praise she

restoresthe sexual and material to the colour and celebratesrather than deniesthe male and female body. The violence of the metaphor `rain of shiny truncheons' and

`shootsoff in all directions' also suggeststhe more colloquial associationsof `blue' as in pornographic. The poem can be read almost as an experienceof making love, the excessof imagery building to a climax, the moment ofjouissance, where the wall of words and water meet. The key to Roberts' technique here is her use of metaphor.

The colour blue hereconnects disparate objects and experiences,opening things up, confusing and merging categoriesand dissolving boundaries.

This breakingdown of boundaries,this enteringin canbe seenthroughout her work.

In her collection Psycheand the Hurricane it occurs in different forms. From the more commonplaceparallel of a landscapejourney interspersedwith a woman

153 giving birth in `The Road to Trento' (PH, 20-21) to `The Broken House' where the

inhabitantinitially separatebecomes the houseitself:

My sky torn down I'm

open-mouthedto the rain.

Pigeons shit in the bath.

No more floor: feet lost

in broken bricks I am

walled in air

bleak

as a marriage

I can't make

or mend.(PH, 24)

In `Driving to Hereford', a poem which seemsto be an elegy for loss, a suicide, the

journey takes the narrator: `acrossthe Wye/ stitchesup/old warring borders:

England/Wales.' The poem plays with metaphorsof healing and repairing against

division and splitting. Imagery of stitching, of healing the splits is returned to again

in the poem where the person being mourned is addressed:

In the hospital

you stitchedup the lips

of wounds. Then hitch-hiked a ride back,stuck

154 your lips to the car's

udder, and sucked.(PH, 40-41)

This is a suddenand shocking image becauseof its quietnessand its seductive sound;the assonanceemphasising the reversalof the nurture suckling image created by the juxtaposition of car and udder. In this casethe desire for nurture leadsto death. As in the Channel dividing England and Francewater here is again used as a metaphor for both separationand connection.The river Wye breaksthrough the borders of England and Wales: `like a birth' which separatesand divides. Imagery of water returns in the referenceto Charon who in Greek myth ferried the souls of the dead acrossthe river to the underworld. So the water herebecomes a movement towardsdeath. Water/sea is boththe watersof birth but alsothe returnto deathand unconsciousobliteration. The metaphorof boundaries,of healing the splits is tied up with women's position in society and construction in language.The poem finishes with the lines: `You held all your words/ down. Swollen. Then you dived in. ' The inability of the subject to reconcile their feelings with the available languageleads to dissolution and death.

In this poem the narrator is outside describing, separate-in other poemssuch as

`praise blue' or `The broken house' the narrator entersinto the experiencebeing described. Indeed it is no longer simply described but `felt'. This concernwith how the poemsare felt extendsto the reader also and Roberts seesit as part of her political project: `Self-expressionas well as analysis is part of the feminist

The is hard project... effectthat reading a novel or poemproduces sometimes to put into wordsbecause it is felt andfeeling in our societyis secondto rationalityto the

155 controlof experiencethrough words. ' (17) Robertsexhorts us to let go of that

control and let ourselvesbe open to the experienceof the world through her poetry.

Writing as Reparation.

In an essaywhich discussesT. S. Eliot's `Tradition and the Individual Talent',

Roberts describesthe differences betweenher own approachto writing as a woman

and the tenets outlined by Eliot in his influential essay.While she finds limited

points of connectionwith Eliot, the notion of the poet's mind as a receptaclefor all

kinds of impressions,thoughts and sensationswhich can't be separatedfrom each

other is one point of connection, she takesissue with Eliot's notion of the importance

of `impersonality.' Eliot wrote `The more perfect the artist, the more completely

separatein him will be the man who suffersand the mind which creates;the more

perfectly will the mind digest and transmutethe passionswhich are its material.' (18)

Roberts critiques impersonality as a masculinedoctrine, tied up with denial of the

feminine. Unlike Eliot, Roberts advocatesa connectionbetween the person who

suffers or experiencesbliss and the person who writes the poem and this connection occurs during the processof creation. For Roberts personalmemory is crucial to creativity. She seeswriting as connectedto re-membering and reparation. In this essayshe outlines her own aesthetic:

`Having found out that memory and the imagination are crucially linked inside some kind of `inner space' I have come to seethat the processof creation involves the processof repairing. Rememberingis re-membering (as Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich and Melanie Klein, all in their own ways, have pointed out). I have come to seehow my `outer' searchfor a tradition of poetry-writing in which I can belong and feel

156 welcome,which I canhelp to makefuller andmore representative by my reading

and studying, has been by `inner' to to matched my search,my quest re-member ...

find what I lost, to re-energise,mend, put back together, somethingbeloved and

important that has been missing or damagedor destroyed.A body. A body of

knowledge.A bodyof love.' (19)

For Roberts it is the image of the mother `the absentone gone underground' that

connectsthe inner and outer worlds.

Here Roberts invokes the work of Melanie Klein and Klein's work on creativity

seemsto me appositeto Roberts' description of writing as reparation. Klein argued

that all creative activity can be seenas an attempt to recreatethe lost object, the

mother. The notion of creativity as `reparation' is expressedin her essay`Infantile

anxiety situationsreflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse' where she

illustrates the workings of reparationthrough the development of the artist Ruth

Kjar. (20)

In Klein's work the focus is on the pre-oedipalphase and the significance for the

baby of its relationship to the mother's breast. The baby createsan identity through

introjection and projection, internalising and externalising good and bad objects,

primary amongstwhich is the mother's breast. She arguedthat there are two phases that the baby moves through in constructing an identity. Firstly there is the paranoid-

schizoid position where the baby totally vulnerable and dependenton the mother fears retaliation from her (being devoured, poisonedetc. ) becauseof the splitting of and projection of its own destructivephantasies onto her. As the baby developsin

157 the secondquarter of the first year, it is gradually able to perceive and take in the

mother (or its primary carer) as a whole person. It learns to integrate both loving and

hating experiencesand accepttheir co-existencein the sameperson. Although the

baby may continue to feel empty and hostile about the mother's independent

existence, its fear of retaliation is gradually replacedby feelings of guilt and

ambivalence leading to the mourning of the depressiveposition where the baby can

creatively make reparationand establishindividuation. In Klein, the baby's feelings

of guilt and anxiety arise from the baby's phantasisedmurderous attacks on the

mother. (Unlike Freud where the guilt comes from fantasiesof murdering the father.)

If the baby can repair the damageto its externalworld (the mother) and its internalised objects through loving reparative feelings, its inner world can be transformed by repopulating it with good objects and the mother can be restored and repaired.The child negotiatesthe depressiveposition successfullyand achievesthe necessaryseparation from the mother. By learning to integrate good and bad qualities in the same person,the baby can begin to give up its crude binary phantasiesof love and hate and recognise a more complex reality. This createsa more integrated self. Klein took the view that most of us never entirely resolve the depressiveposition throughout our lives. Indeed her work stresses`positions' rather than phasesof developmentto emphasisethat both infant and adult can oscillate between psychical structuresthroughout life.

This creation of an integrated self rather than a split self is central to Roberts' writing. It is often played out through the metaphorof the twin, a recurring motif in

Roberts' work which I shall discussin detail later in the chapter. In an earlier essay in 1983 Roberts again cites Klein in explaining her need to write. `I know that I write

158 out of the experienceof loss; the earliest experienceof that is the loss of my mother.

Loss is an emptinessfilled with terrifying feelings: burning hate, sizzling despair,

ragethat tears you apart.' (21) The phrasesRoberts useshere echo Klein's

description of the infant's paranoid - schizoid position. The needto make reparation

and restorethe mother in the depressivephase, to make her a good object again, is

according to Klein an important factor in the creative impulse.

Roberts' use of this aspectof Klein's work, the needto make reparation for the

infant's murderousfantasies towards the mother,connects with the usemade in her

work of the post-Lacanianwritings of Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray. Klein's infant

splitting of the `badbreast' becomesin a post-Lacanianreading culture's denigration

of the feminine, the `murder of the mother' that both Irigaray and Kristeva write

about. (22) Although Kleinian psychoanalysisis often set againstthe post-Lacanian

theoriesof Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous, Roberts' work draws on both. Roberts is

interestedin the effects on us of the early mechanismsof splitting and the need for

reparation to heal both the mother and the self. To do this, however, Roberts has to find the split off mother, the repressedfeminine, in language,and here she draws on the ideas of theorists suchas Kristeva. Both Klein and Kristeva in different ways

suggestthat destructive responsesto identities perceivedas different stem from an inability to recognise and accept our own `other', the difference within ourselves which we unconsciouslyhold in contempt. Whereasthe Freudian based work of

Kristeva focuseson the divisive effects of the child's symbolic castration by the father, Kleinian theory describesthe same phenomenonas the splitting and projection of inner `bad' feelings out onto external objects/others.

159 To find the repressedfeminine in languageis central to Roberts' purposeand the

creation of an integrated self. Her way of connectingand finding the repressed

feminine is through the unconsciousand in her essay`On Imagination,' she draws on

post-structuralismand Lacanian theory to arguethat out of the loss of the mother's

body, the chaosengendered by absence,`we learn to createsomething beautiful: our

words, later on our gifts, later still our works of art. We recreatethe mother inside

ourselves,over and over again.' (23) What writing gives back she arguesis `the

maternal body, my mother's body, alive and warm and generous,an image of that

body which saysthat is how shewas, that is how we were, once, together. Blissful

mutual giving and taking. What the French call la jouissance and what the French

feminist writers like Julia Kristeva and Hdlone Cixous saywe find again through

writing and reading.' (24) Writing for Roberts is a way of reconnectingwith the lost

mother but in order to do this we must open ourselvesup to the world, the

boundariesbetween the consciousrational and the unconsciousmust be broken so

that the wall of words and water can meet. Roberts' invocation here of Cixous and

Kristeva is, I think, significant. For Kristeva poetic languageis the spacewhere such

fusion is most possible.Poetic languageis associatedwith loss of control, with the

French concept of `jouissance,' with languageas a feminine pleasurerecalling the

baby's blissful babble at the maternal breast.Roberts' poetry, I would argue,

intertextualisesKristeva's ideasin quite a consciousway.

For Kristeva the opacity of the body makes itself felt through the semiotic mode of discourse,that pleasurablecall and relation to the mother's body which has not been repressedby the patriarchal symbolic order and whose drives, feelings and affects return to languagein the form of alliteration, rhythmic pulsations and enigmatic gaps

160 in sense,what had been lost since castration and the mirror stage.In Flesh and Blood

a chapter headed`Anon' gives us the best sustainedexample of Roberts' technique

in recreating the mother in language.It also illustrates the poetic nature of Roberts'

fiction:

`mamabebelove you are herewith you together us now over and over so non-stop

mamabbbeso wanting you born this love us so close skinskin talking heartbeat

belonging with you allowed love home flesh my mamabebeour body singing to our

so beautiful love listen mamabebelisten:

swimming in our waters we listen

to ourheartbeat

we is onewhole undivided

you/mebroken now mended

you/merestored mamabebe

our body of love pickedup putbacktogether

repaired

made whole again

by these us-hands

mamabebe listen bodysong '(25) our ...

The style here is musical, fluid, playful, privileging sound as well as sight, deliberately anti-logical and anti-patriarchal. It embodiesthe characteristicsof

161 Cixous' ecriture feminine and Irigaray's parler femme as well as Kristeva's semiotic.

(26) Kristeva links specific drives with particular vowel and consonantarticulation.

The repeated`m' of `mama' she constructsas `labial, nasal liquid' signifying orality

and a desire for fusion with the mother. (As againstthe `p' of papa for example

signifying destructive anality.) She writes `the phonemesreclaim what the sounds have lost in becoming soundsof a given language:they reclaim the topography of the body which reproducesitself in them.' (27) The novel from which this chapter is taken begins with the line `An hour after murdering my mother I was in Soho' and plays with unconsciousfears and desiresabout destroying and repairing the mother's body.

The Mother Tongue.

Kristeva's development of Lacan's narrative of loss-namelythat the semiotic visits languagewith a compensatorymaternal presence,so that instead of incorporating food from our mother, we are sustainedby languageinstead- echoes through

Roberts' work. In `Tales of Love' Kristeva refers to the displacementof hunger onto the psychic level so that we may experience `the joys of chewing, swallowing, nourishing' with words. (28) Not surprisingly then food is a common motif in

Roberts' work which takes us back to the early hunger for the mother. Sceatshas argued,writing specifically of her novels, that Roberts' women are `hungry with grief and desire,replaying birth nurturing and separationas a meansto reconciliation and autonomy and learning along the way to give voice to their hungers.' (29)

We cansee this enactedin Roberts'poem, `The day the wall camedown. ' (PH, 74-

77) The metaphorof the Berlin wall, a high man-madeboundary to separateand

162 divide whatonce was unified, is usedto explorethe reconciliationof the narrator with her twin sister. The narrator meets her twin sister and reflects on what separationmeant: `To keep myself in/I had to keep you out:/our free air hardenedto glass unscratchable.' The poem aboundswith metaphorsof feeding, signifying both desire unableto be satedbut also nurture and connection.In Roberts' poetry food is nurture and sensuality but also the devouring mother and world:

The times were un-nourishing.

Therewas onetoo many: it wasyou or me.

You thinned yourself downto bone broth. Your hair fell out. your toesand fingers turned blue.

I waswhite fat, pork belly

I was mash and grease.

The comingdown of the wall occursduring lunch which

eats up the afternoon

andwe chewover the babiesyou've got and the baby I dreamedI'd steal

163 andyou feedme advicefresh and gritty as pepper,necessary as salt

my sister in black and silver your breath close, your face flushed with wine

and we taste garlic, spaghetti anchovies,broccoli hot with red chillies

andwhat hasdivided us comesdown

the work of our mouths desirous eating, meeting.'

The pronouns `you' and `I' have become`we; ' hunger for the mother's breast no longer drives them, splitting them apart. Now both women can experiencemutual desire and satisfaction.Returning home after the meetingthe narrator feels herself in a new part of the city where everything looks new and possible, fertile and alive.

Roberts' strangesurreal imagery works well here to convey the freedom and

164 excitementof the world seenanew. Inky irises`unfurl their bluefur tongues/

anemonesin mud-coloured ruffs/open their fat black eyes.'

The splitting of the self into the fat and thin, the self who is sated and full and the

self who is hungry and wanting, recurs throughout Roberts' work. In Daughters of

the House it is the two cousins,who later discover they are really twins, who play

out this split. Leonie the materialist, the `fat' one can be read as representingthe

maternal, the feminine, and Therese,the thin one who abjectsthe mother's body and

turns to life in the convent standsfor the law of the father. By the novel's closure

both havelearned to embracethe `other' deniedpart of their self.

In the female world that Roberts createswomen are the nurturers and hence all representpotential mothers. In 'Magnificat' she celebratesa relationship with a woman who savesher after the end of an affair with a man.

oh this man what a meal he made of me how he chewedand gobbled and sucked

in the end he spat me all out (30)

Nurturing and healing arrives in the shapeof a woman. Roberts mixes religious and domesticlanguage to envisionthe powerof femaleconnection:

you arrived on the dot in the nick

165 of time, with your red curls flying

I was about to slip down the sink like grease

I nearly collapsed,I almost

wiped myself out like a stain

I calledfor you, andyou came,you voyaged

fierceas a smallarchangel with swordsand breasts

you declaredthe birth of a newlife

in my kitchen there was an annunciation

and I was still, awed by your hair's glory

you commandedme to sing of my redemption.

The `salvation' is a peculiarly female one. Like most of Roberts' significant

momentsof communion, it doesn't occur in a church but in a kitchen, a female space

of warmth and food often equatedwith the mother's body. In the novel Impossible

Saints Saint Josephinefantasises about a house shewould build for single women.

Significantly the kitchen of Josephine'sfantasy house would be the chapel and the

altar the table on which they preparedfood. `Masswould be a questionsimply of

cooking a good dinner'. (31) The archangelin this poem hasboth swords and

breasts,representing both the male and female principles. `I was a child again,

pyjamaed/ in winceyette, my hair plaited, and you/ listened, you soothedme like

cakes and milk, and I poured /it out, I flowed all over you / like wine, like oil, you

touched the place where it hurt... ' The bodies mergeand healing comesthrough connection, recalling the nurture of the mother who Roberts acknowledgesexists in all our desires.Roberts has said that the three main topics in her writing are food, sex

166 and God (32). Here in her use of metaphor all three fuse and interconnect. The unity

we searchfor through religion, a displacementperhaps for our hunger for the

mother, comesthrough the body of another woman. Again as in `The day the wall

came down' food representsboth sustenanceand bliss and also destructivegreed

recalling unfulfilled hunger.

Women as the sourceof food, nurture and creativity is celebratedin Roberts' writing

but even more celebratedis women's hunger and appetite, somethingculturally

deniedthem. Both aspectsco-exist in her poem `bangkok breakfast' which shows the

ambivalencetowards the female/ mother-a powerful sustainerof life yet culturally

powerlessand hungry:

the monk

stands

under a flowering tree

prodigal with sweetness

women come women go and come with earthenpots to fill his, thus their own torn flesh of priestlesness

food and beggarboth they give

167 menand children suck

for their (AS, 1) salvation ...

The women are part of nature, connectedto the flowering tree which sheltersand

protectsthe monk, sustaininghim like their food but he is culture and therefore fed

and valued. Their `coin of vile body' is part of the cycle of nature but they remain

hungry subsisting on the monk's `spareshadow. ' In other poemsthe female personae

give voice to their physical/sexualappetites. In `The Official Dinner' the persona

watchingthe self-importantbehaviour of the malesenators turns to herown meal:

I shut my mouth, biting on

grilled aubergines

delicious flesh and crackly

blackened skin.

It slips down easily. (PH, 15)

In `Flying to Italy',

The Alps are a college of grand-

mothers in white caps.Massed

profiles rear up, as pure as nuns (PH, 13)

The extendedmetaphor is continued and developedbut these are not benign, pure

old ladies.They aredevouring and cackling with sexualappetites ready to `cherish

168 /the flesh of businessmen'.Pragmatic rather than malevolent they `teachyoung

wives and other/ survivors how to carve up/ the sun-dried dead,and eat.' This is a

Hansel and Gretel world rather than any simplistic associationof ancient woman

with benign nature. The grandmothersare sexualised;they have appetitesand

hunger. Female nature and appetitecan destroythe `tin carrycots' of culture.

Incorporating the Mother

The continued adult need for `incorporation' arising out of the baby's early

experiencesof the mother's milk or breast is common to psychoanalyticperspectives

although the meaning and importanceof orality differs within these perspectives.For

Freud the baby's pleasureat the satisfactionof her/his hunger was referred to as a

self-preservationinstinct. This experienceis then displacedonto the sexual/psychical

plane where it is experiencedas the pleasureof incorporation-the `goodness'of the

mother's breast which gives the baby its earliest senseof identity and security. As

adults we continue to bolster ourselveswith oral substitutes:when this becomes

destructively addictive, Freudians diagnosea failure of mothering. Ellmann argues that despiteFreud's privileging of sex, it is actually food that is the `repressed' because`the act of eating representsthe primal violation of the ego'. (33) She argues that our first experience of feeding is force-feeding, `asinfants, we were fed by others and ravishedby the food they thrust into our jaws. We eat therefore to avenge ourselvesagainst this rape inflicted at the very dawn of life... ' (34) She takes issue with the equation of hungerwith instinct and sex with culture and argues for a more complex reading of hunger as always more than the biological demand for nourishment, in particular bound up with the establishmentof the self and identity.

Ellmann seesKlein's work as the most resonantwith the cultural meaning of food

169 and incorporation. For Klein, as we have seenabove, the breast/introjectionis even

more central in the baby's developmentbut it has a different meaningand is never

displaced by the penis as in Freudian theory. The basis of object relations theory is

the creation of idenity through the incorporation of others into the self and as

Eilmann argues,Klein's work `providesthe richest psychoanalytictheory of ingestion, for her imagination seemsto be consumedwith the idea of cannibalism'.

(35) Here is Klein discussingsplitting processesin relation to the object:

`The destructive impulse projected outwards is first experiencedas oral aggression.I believe that oral-sadistic impulses towards the mother's breast are active from the beginning of life, though with the onset of teething the cannibalistic impulses increasein strength-a factor stressedby Abraham.' (36)

For Kristeva the semiotic visits languagewith a compensatorymaternal presence, displacing our early incorporation of the mother's breast into language.Roberts plays with these ideas on oral gratification where we comfort and bolster ourselves with food as pleasurablessubstitites for the mother's breast. Hunger and the desire to incorporatethe mother is taken to extremesin her novel Impossible Saints where the uncorrupted body of Josephineis progressively consumedby the pilgrims who come to look at her.

`Someof the faithful werefeasting on Josephine.Taking bites out of her.They scurried of with little chunks of her flesh concealedin their cheeksor under their tongues.The sisters watched them scamperfurtively away, then discoveredtheir little excavations.The fingernailsof the left hand,the toenailsof both feet,the

170 eyebrows,the eyelashes,the end of the nose. Someonehad torn openthe habit and

bitten off the nipples. Someoneelse had nibbled the earlobes.The mouth was badly

bruised.' (IS, 14)

Roberts plays here on the Catholic meaningof the Eucharist where what is

consumedat communion is the actual body of Christ rather than a symbol for it.

Later on in the novel, SisterMaria by way of conservationcovertly preparesa heavy

`pork' stew made of Josephine'sremains to be packed into earthenwarejars and

sealedwith fat.

In terms of breaking down boundariesof self and other, inside and outside, food then

has a special status.Physical boundariesand thresholdsare clearly crucial to food.

Uneaten food is other, part of the world outside, but its statuschanges as we ingest it.

Cixous theorises `As soon as we embrace,we salivate, one of us wants to eat, one of us is going to be swallowed up in little pieces,we all want to be eaten,in the beginning we were all formerly born-to-eat, wolfing it down, eating like a horse; we are starvedfull of whetted appetites.' (37) In Roberts' writing food and sex are interconnectedthrough metaphor. In Flesh and Blood for example Felicite reactsto

Albert's preparationof choppedmeat.

`A rush of dark air reachedF< licite at the corner table where she sat, the smell of chops frying, sizzle and sputter as drops of blood jumped out into the hot fat, a stifled cry, a giggle. She could imagine the rest of it. Two white hands casting the red chops marbled with fat into the black pan, two red lips parted, the meat seared and scorching as the juices caramelized,Albert's hand diving under her lifted skirt, a

171 splash of cognac over the chops,then Albert reappearedwith a smoking silver dish

piled with cutlets and a bottle of wine tucked under one arm. Fdlicite smiled and

smiled as she took up the spoon and fork and dug the silver prongs through the

crackling skin into the red flesh underneath.' (FB, 39)

In `Touristson GrisedalePike' the narratorcelebrates sexual pleasure through

images of height, of falling, of letting go. Having got to the top of a mountainthe

narrator kissesher companion:

I tested vertiginous

on your mouth's

taste of garlic and olives

andheld on

to the view of no lack

all the down (PH, 66-67) way ...

The sensesintermingle: languageis translatedinto a physical sensation,a taste, a kiss, collapsing the linguistic and the physical in sexual releaseand celebration. The narratorfeels `no lack'. Roberts'words here recall Cixous. In `FirstNames of No one' Cixous celebratestexts which go beyondthe `limits, ' beyond lack, castration, the Law and death. `But the limit is also a vertiginous peak, from which elsewhere, the other, and what is to come, can be seen.' (38) In Roberts' poem the erotic is projected on to the landscapein metaphorsof desire and consumption:

the graphite mine

172 sinking its rusty teeth

in the valley's side

geeseplumping up nicely

in orchards,the kestrels

choosingtheir prey,poised over

the fat mound of Swinside Hill.

Roberts' work then aboundswith descriptionsof food; sensual,material and at times

disturbing. This is part of her French heritage and we seethis tradition in writers

such as Colette and more recently in writers like Claude Tardat and Alina Reyes.

(39)

Food is also used in more direct ways to explore her dual heritage -it is a cultural

marker, symbolising inclusion or exclusion of desirelbelonging. Sceats,in a study of

food in contemporarywomen's fiction, arguesthat the contrastbetween the French

and English traditions reappearsseveral times in Roberts' novels. (40) She cites `A

Piece of the Night' where Julie Fanchot comparesthe sauces,stocks, wines, eggs and cream of her childhood with the pork pies, fish and chips, breadpudding, haddock and greasy sausagesshe experiencesat Oxford. Here it is the high minded contempt of the Oxford Scholarsfor food that sheremarks. The richness of French rural food contrastssharply with a cultivated English asceticism.Later in the samenovel though,when Julie returnsto England,her thoughtsare of `eggsand bacon and hot tea: home.' (41)

173 France is associatedwith the mother and the physical fulfilment of hunger. Food is a

nostalgic presencein Roberts' memoriesof France. In `Une Glossaire/A Glossary'

severalentries deal with food which is rich and nurturing. As Sceatsargues, the

insecurity and divided loyalties of a bilingual or bi-nutritional upbringing in two

countries are acutely illustrated in Daughters of the House by the conversation

between Leonie, Victorine and Thereseover the making of potato soup, gougere and

a cake for supper. (42) Food is a signifier of belonging and Leonie, desperateto

belong, to be French, to shut off her Englishness,is reminded of her despised

ethnicity through the symbol of food.

`French cakes,Leonie mused:aren't as good when they come out of the oven

as English cakes. No currants and raisins. No icing. No hundredsand thousandsor

anything.

Frenchcooking, Victorine asserted: is the bestin the world!

Her blue eyesnarrowed to marble chips. Shepushed back a long fair curl

with one hand. She whacked butter and eggs with her wooden spoon.

Suet pudding with slabs of butter and white sugar, Leonie recited: fried eggs and bacon, fish and chips, kippers, marmalade,proper tea, Eccles cakes.

Thereseflicked a piece of muddy potato peel acrossthe table.

Everyone knows that English food is terrible, she stated: soggy boiled vegetablesin white sauce,overcooked meat, I don't know how your mother could stand it, having to go and eat stuff like that. Shestopped being really French, everyonesays so. The English are just heathens,aren't they Victorine?

Heathenswas a word Victorine applied to foreigners. Who were not

Catholics.' (Daughters, 46-47)

174 Food and physical sensualityare also associatedwith creativity. In the witty short

story `Taking It Easy' an English woman writer who survives on apples,crispbreads

and saladfor lunch gets writer's block and borrows a houseof a friend in France for

two weeks where she enjoys the food and sex and idlenessthat her life in London

prohibits: `For breakfastI had exactly what I fancied: two fat croissantswith apricot jam, a piece of baguette with butter and camembert,a bunch of muscatgrapes, and

severalcups of black coffee with sugar. I consumedthis feast very slowly while

lying in bed.' (43) The story aboundswith such descriptionsand celebratescreativity through the sensualand the material feeding of the body rather than the discipline of the mind. Roberts herselfwrites of the relationship betweenwriting and food for her: `Writing feels like pulling somethingout of my insides...I've lost part of myself, I becomehungry. Meals are fuel and reward. I also find that cooking myself a quick but delicious lunch, to be eatenat the typewriter, will get me through my writer's block of the morning and produce pagesof writing. I eat with one hand and type with the other. The mother in me feeds the baby in me.' (44)

The richness and complexity of French rural gastronomy and the sustenanceand love equatedwith it is a haunting absencein the poem `America assaultsmy mouth' where all that is modem/post-modemis imagined through food. At the start of the poem the personaflies to America. Significantly it is not the seaimagery of the channel associatedwith return to Franceand the sustenanceof the mother, but plane- images of air associatedwith the masculine- where a `rouged hostess' `doles out sweaty/ fettucine, beef shavings in glue sauce.'

175 The kitchen's clean machines processthe flesh coolly as hospitals.

Racks of knives and pans; fruit and veg packedlike wounds in gauze and ice.

Coffee beansin a glassjar: black polished wooden beadsthat slide through my hands,a broken rosary.

Our host invokes bones:risotto

With marrow,osso buco, boiled broth.

His wife hands ladles. (AS, 43-44)

The imagery is one of communion but sanitised.The coldnessand alienation of this world is developed in the final two verses,the faculty club where everything is processedand weak, where the `mouths of baby-facedmen' eat bacon and eggs

`fried sunny side up. ' Food has lost its meaning and its connectionwith nature, with flesh. The only referenceto the natural world in the poem is the fingers of red blossom which tap at the window pane-evennature here is polite and distant- of the cafe `cut from onyx and formica' where in lines reminiscent of The Fire Sermonin

`The Waste Land' (45):

Sunburnedyouths gobble sfogliatelle with ricotta discussreal estate,singles computer dating parties with silk-clad girl execs spooning in Sweet'n'Low.

176 The persona,the `foreigner' here also eats a typically American dish `a muffin

stainedwith blueberries' but it is not the comfort and sustenanceof the past that it

fills her with but fear of the future. The eclectic dishes and foods representedhere,

which sound exciting, are all somehowreduced to the bland processedconsumer and

speeddriven world. They are disconnectedfrom their origins and therefore do not

offer lasting nourishment or pleasure.

This poem is significantly placed after a prose poem `On Boulogne Sands' in

Roberts' collection All the SelvesI Was. Here basedon a painting by Philip Wilson

Steer is an opposite world- French children play on the sandwhile watched by their

English governess.In the closing lines `Soon it will be tea-time: lemonadein tin

cups, fresh bread and bitter chocolate.The wind blows sandinto her eyes,salt onto

her lips. ' (AS, 41) The food here evokes childhood nurture, sensualpleasure, the

past.

Desire for the Mother.

The collection which engagesmost directly with the mother and what she meansto

us is her first solo collection The mirror of the mother, published in 1986.(46) All the poemsin this collection explore the powerful meaninginvested in the symbol of the mother. Many of the poemsare concernedwith attemptsto find the lost mother in friends, lovers, grandmothersand other surrogates.Roberts' engagementwith the psychoanalyticand particularly the ideasof Lacan is apparentthroughout this collection. This is illustrated in her poem `women's entry into culture is experienced as lack' where she takes issue with Lacan's phallocentric thesis on women's negative entry into languageand culture.

177 he wishes he were a one of those able to danceand shake breastsand belly andhips loose, a not-himself, nothing but

he wishes they did not have a hiding from it in his bed stillness he bruises easily hewishes he wasstill a little boy so that he did not haveto facethem telling him he is an oppressor he needsthem to scold him darling oppressor if he were a

he wouldjoin the movement but at least his friends are always who struggle he hasnothing to do but help them out of silence, he has nothing else to do

178 with oppression

he wishesthey hada too

so they could all just be friends. (MM, 27)

Through her use of form and spacehere, Roberts literally creates`lack' making the

sign for woman unrepresentablein language.However by writing the poem from a

male perspectiveand leaving a gap to signify the word penis, she challengesthe primacy of the phallic signifier and repositionsenvy as that of the `breastsand belly and hips' rather than the penis. The poem celebrateswomen's multiple and fluid sexuality. Roberts' poem also reclaims language,putting women into culture and history as embodied women with desires.The title of the collection itself evokes

Lacan's concept of the `mirror stage' where at aroundthe age of six months the baby seesan image-usually the mother-thatit believes to be itself and falls in love with this apparently ordered image that contrastswith its undifferentiated feelings of chaos. It believes this image to be itself but in reality it is always an `other.' With this changedawareness of self comesa growing awarenessof `lack', an awareness that we are in fact separatefrom our mother, a feeling that is the genesisof desire and that all of us keep trying to fill but never can. We think the phallus as the primary signifier will fill the gap but this is an illusion, a symbol and a symbol of the lost mother not the penis. The real subject of desire for both girls and boys - the mother- is thus always beyond consciousness- projected onto a multiplicity of different objects, even, Roberts suggests,political ideologies. In `Irish prisoners of war' the causefor which the prisonersstarve and hunger is equatedwith a loss of mothering:

179 wild men, naked on the blanket

wild women, starving for what

new mothering?(AS, 11)

In `New Year's Eve at Lavarone' Robertsuses the questformat to searchfor the

`myth's heart.' The time is New Year's eve, a paganfestival and a time of hope and

new beginnings. In images reminiscent of Hoffmann she createsa fairy- tale

landscape,covered in snow where nothing is quite what it seems-a `magictree' is

`ribbed/ solid with icicles, dripping/ candles of water. ' Logs coveredin snow are laid

out `like deadbrides. ' Through this the subject of the poem is led by:

Our narrator, the man in the red woollen cap

leads us to the myth's heart. He scrapeswith his

stick in a white dip, exposesa perfect circle

of glazed grey ice. He uncoversthe mirror of the mother, she who goes away comesback, goes away. Her cold eye blinks unblinks. Our kiss on her round mouth is chalk, inscribesus on herbody's blackboard: want, want. (AS, 38-39)

The mother that the poet and her companionshave been searchingfor is frozen, devoid of life and emotion. Sheis an illusion, a `want' that is unable to be filled.

Separationfrom the mother is necessary,Roberts implies, but it is never complete:

this women's work is thrifty and grim:

180 learning to savemyself, learning to live

alone through the long winter nights

meansso much unknotting, unknitting

unravelling, untying the mother-chord

-so much undoing. (AS, 17)

Many of the poemsin this collection draw on myth and Roberts' use of the fabular.

This aspectof her writing is often characterisedas part of her French heritage yet at

the time she was writing, revisioning myth was part of the politics of cultural

feminism in both Britain and America. Many writers of the 70s and 80s used fairy

tale and myth to explore constructionsof gender and to `revision' new gender

possibilities. Waugh (47) exploresthe different manifestationsin literature of this

period of the searchfor spiritual meaning in the post-enlightenmentrationalised

social order. The sacredwas addressedthroughout literature in interesting ways

outside the framework of orthodox religious belief. She posits Hughes as the

representativepoet of the 70s concernedwith the primitive animal world of our

repressedinstincts and darknessinternalised by the rational secularsociety. For

many women writers in the 70s and 80s, it was the use of myths which seemedto

offer fertile ground for exploring the limited construction of woman in culture and

the possibility of moving beyondthis to envision new political and social formations.

As Humm (48) arguessecond wave feminism took shapein a utopian mode with

texts such as Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (49) envisioning new ways of

organising reproductionwhich would radically changewomen's relationship to the

existing order. The rise of cultural feminism and texts suchas Monique Wittig's Les

Guerilleres and Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology (50) both createda new women's

181 languagein order to describenew social forms of organisation and new ways of

envisioning the political. Humm arguesthat this concernwith utopias and women's

identity was inextricably linked to questionsof literary authority and many key texts

of literary criticism in the 70s explored the possibilities of myths and other forms of

fantasy writing as a way out of the limited constructionsof women in traditional

literary canons.

Myths are attractive to writers for a number of reasons.They are simultaneously

private and public. They have a statusas belonging to high culture, handeddown

through the agesby religious, literary, and educationalauthority. At the sametime,

`myth is quintessentiallyintimate material, the stuff of dream life, forbidden desire,

inexplicable motivation- everything in the psyche that to rational consciousnessis

unreal, crazedor abominable' (51). So myth embodiesthe western constructsof

male and female. Part of the power of myth is this ability to reveal the shadow side

of human desiresand actions and so it is a fertile sourcefor a writer like Roberts who is interestedin the whole person,the dark side as well as the light. Many of the texts utilising myth and fantasy were also concernedwith spirituality and the search for aspectsof a goddessculture. The theory of female power in religion as well as in other areasof pre-history and culture was attractive since, if women were not subordinatein the past we have proof that they are not so by nature. The rise of ecofeminism in the 70s and its emphasison the connectionbetween women, nature and spirituality also gave impetus to the exploration of the mother goddessin pre- history. Women poets utilising myth and fairytale during this period are too numerousto mention. Ostriker (52) and Yorke (53) have explored the different strategiesemployed by American poets using this material but in Britain and Ireland

182 poets contemporaneouswith Roberts suchas Liz Lochheadin `The Grimm Sisters',

Sumniti Namjoshi in Feminist Fables and Michelene Wandor's `Gardensof Eden'

have reworked myths in interesting ways. (54)

In her first solo collection of poems, The mirror of the mother, the myth which she

choosesto revision in a sequenceof poems is that of Persephoneand Demeter. The

backgroundto this myth is discussedin Chapter 2 in relation to EavanBoland's

treatmentof it. The myth of Demeter and Persephoneis an attractive one for feminist writers. Adrienne Rich has written of it in Of WomanBorn (55) and SusanGubar explores its power in `Mother, maidenand the marriage of death' (56) where she arguesthat women use this myth to redefine, reaffirm and celebratefemale consciousness.Feminist philosophersand ethicists such as Carol Gilligan and

Annette Baier are also attractedto this myth, reading in it a defenseof the human practice of caring for and empathisingwith others. (57) Demeter loves her daughter deeply and is willing to fight to preserveher connectionwith Persephone.She imaginatively recreatesPersephone's loneliness and is determinedthat her daughter not slip away and be forgotten. The myth also emphasisesthe way caring for particular people and caring for the world are intertwined. When Demeter's bond with her daughter is severedthe world at large falls into disarray. The myth hasthus often been used to representan alternative female or feminine ethic against a male ethic which privileges a principled universalistic mode of reasoning. Such feminine ethics were associatedin the U. K. with cultural feminism and in Francewith theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray, both of whom have drawn on this myth in their writings. In Sexesand GenealogiesIrigaray stressesthe exclusion of the mother- daughter representationfrom the symbolic and cites this myth as one example. (58)

183 She notes how the dominant dyads in our culture, in religion and psychoanalysisfor

example, are father and son or mother and son. Shetakes issue with both Freud and

Lacan's accountsof sexual difference which are dependenton the phallus as marker

difference of sexual and therefore define women always in relation to men - as lack.

Women are subjectedto a logic of the samethat collapsesthe two sexesinto one by measuringboth men and women according to male standards. Irigaray arguesthat it is vital to transform the symbolic if women are to transform their statusand she advocatesas part of this strategythe privileging of representationswhich focus on the mother/daughterrelationship. (59) Theorists have also read in the myth the way that women are invisible to the male power structure. Demeter does not know what has happenedto her daughter and Zeus and Hades do not considerhow Demeter and

Persephonemay feel about the deal they strike.

The mysteriesof Demeterand Persephone were celebrated as a cult annuallyat

Eleusis and indeed survived as the most revered Greek cult until the end of paganism.Pomeroy (60) details the involvement of women in this cult and argues that given the emphasisof the mother goddessand son-consortdyad through antiquity, especially in the Middle East, the appealthat a uniquereligion centring on a mother and daughter relationship had for the Athenians is quite remarkable.A less documentedfestival celebrating this myth but one that was strictly reservedfor women was the Thesmophoria,which was held in autumn in order to ensurethe growth of the seedgrain by meansof fertility magic. Details which survive of this suggesta parallel to the crucifixion and rebirth in its three day structure of offering up, fasting and mourning, and rebirth or `fairbirth' from the Greek `kalligeneia'. One

184 hypothesisfor the existenceof exclusivelywomen's festivals is thatthey were

survivals from a matriarchal period when all religion was in the hands of women.

In Roberts' sequencethe original story is maintained. The poemsshift betweenthe

perspectivesof Persephoneand Demeter but Roberts also draws on post-Lacanian

psychoanalysisin the daughter'sdescription of the desire for return to the mother

and the impossibility of that return to the original state:

last winterI fled from him

backnorth to the speechless

waterfall, back to immaculate ice; I

preferred white perfection, I

preferred to remain intact; I sangthis

loudly enough for him to hear. (AS, 20-22)

Such imagery as `speechlesswaterfall' and `white perfection' recalls Irigaray and

Cixous and the immaculate ice recalls Lacan's image of the mirror, foregroundedin

the title of the collection and explored in detail in the poem `New Year's Eve at

Lavarone.' The mother acceptsher return to the underworld, resignsherself and even gives the daughterher blessing.

this spring my lover came for me again; this time my mother did not hold me back;she blessed me; she

185 suggestedit

was about time; then she releasedmy wrist

The poem representsPersephone's hunger to return to the mother, the `lost body, lost

light, lost voice' but the lastverse seems to acceptthe necessityof enteringthe

symbolic.Roberts uses the twin metaphorthat recursas a motif in herwork:

also there are nights

whenhis blackcoal head

lies next to mine, nights when my heart

drums as the twin of his, my breath and blood

in tune with his, learning to sing

of friendship;a difficult, a new benediction,

This last section reminds me of Cixous's fictional work `Dedans': `Inside' where the

personaconfronts the figure of death.

`Come, says he, let's away to prison, we two alone, without her without them, alone

I will make you alone, alone you will make the night with your lips on my eyes and I shall seeyou beyond walls and time. If you will have me I will hold you in my arms and we shall create new tales. If you won't I shall ask your forgiveness. You will be up above and down below and I shall be inside. Outside, the mystery of things will dry up, under the sun the generationswill wash up worlds over words, but inside we shall have stoppeddying. ' (61)

186 Susan Sellers arguesthat Cixous' text stressesthe paradoxicalnature of the human

situation. Separationbrings loss yet the languagethis producesoffers the possibility

of inscribing and vanquishing loss. (62) In a similar way Roberts' Persephone,

separatedfrom her mother, can find in the realm of the underworld `a new

benediction'. The sequenceends with the poem `Persephonegives birth' where the

cycle of loss and regenerationis set to begin again.

The representationof the myth is modernisedin Roberts' use of tone and particularly

in the perspective of the daughterPersephone. In `Persephonepays a visit to

Demeter' Roberts usesthe Jungianarchetype of the houseto explore the feelings

between mother and daughter. The poem ends with the lines:

I'm like one of those boats down there.

siren bawling with grief: I'm going back

mother, this time I really mean it

I'm really going. (AS, 27)

The sequencedoes not presentthe two worlds of winter and spring, of Hadesand

Demeter, in simplistic ways. In the first poem in the sequencethe sexual relationship

between Persephoneand Hades mergesthe active and passivemetaphors in a pagan

fusion of landscape:

my lover is a dark man we embracein the garden, in the grave; his

187 twisting root is clotted with my black earth

as I break open, and take him in. (AS, 20)

In the poemsthe imageryof the landscapeof the underworldsuggests the womband

the shadow side of the feminine as well as the forces of darkness:`Shall/I be born

from thesewater corridors. ' Demeteras an earthgoddess is alsoin myth associated

with death as well as transformative regeneration.Patiently awaiting the return of her daughter in `Demeter keepsgoing, ' she keeps herself busy nurturing the harvest:

Sheregrets the spoiltfruit, but

labours doggedly on, stocking the hollow bellies of oaks. Then, larders full shepacks down leaf mould,rotten nuts in a compostdance: death is no waste...(AS, 25)

Roberts also explores the ambivalenceat the heart of the mother/daughter relationship- the desire to remain attachedwhich co-exists with a need to separate and be independent.Growth and development must involve this. In many versions of the myth, Persephonechooses to remain separatefrom her mother. Zeus decreedthat

Persephonecould return to the mother only if she refused all food. Persephoneopts to eat some pomegranateseeds, providing nurture for herself. We could then readthe myth as pointing to the need to break ties with the parent to find other sourcesof nurture. The seed must separatefrom the parent organism and lie dormant for a time drawing strength from the earth, after which it can bloom forth independently into the daylight.

188 The poem again draws on the state of existing in two spheres,two countriesand the

effects of moving between thesetwo spaces,never feeling completely whole or at

home in either, never quite reachingthat moment mid-channel where true language

is restored.In her novel The Wild Girl, which tells the story of Mary Magdalene,the

young Mary feeling homesick and longing to see her mother comforts herselfby

visiting the temple of Demeter and Persephone.(63)

The final poemin the sequencefinds Demeter rushing to herdaughter who is about

to givebirth:

in the enormous field

tight with corn,the stiff

jostle of stalks, gold arrows

pouring over the hill, headspressing

Demeter's waist, their heavy tips cutting her hands that sheholds up and out, hostage

to the harvestand the heat

she beats a path through

sheparts the gold waves shehurries the cornfield resists

189 in the churchyard

Persephonein her bone nightgown

squatsdown (AS, 28)

The cycle of unity andseparation continues.

The Masculine Principle: Le Pere.

Unlike ethicists such as Gilligan who readthe myth as the possibility of a new

female ethic, (64) and Irigaray who seesHades abducting the daughterfrom her

mother as a wholly negative symbol for patriarchal culture, (65) Roberts does not

advocatea loss of the symbolic. She seemshere to echo Kristeva's argumentthat

women need both the imaginary and the symbolic positions in order to speakwith a

meaningful identity. This is suggestedby her use of the twin metaphorthat recurs as

a motif in her work: `nights when my heart / drums as the twin of his, my breath and

blood / in tune with his'.

While from Kristeva in Roberts' stanceis significantly different - particularly

relationto feminismand lesbianism-she does seem to advocatethe needfor woman's

languageto exist within a mediating symbolic. In her analysis of the position from

which women can speakKristeva seesparticular problems in positing a woman's

language. Shewarns that women need the languageof the paternal, symbolic order to protect themselvesfrom the merged identity with the mother which in its complete return to infantile fusion will ultimately result in regressivestates of madnessand hysteria outside the symbolic. Equally problematic is speakingfrom the position of the mother within languageand the symbolic as a feminine position. In this casethe

190 woman risks merely reimposing, in the opposite form of a female symbolic, the truth

claims of the phallus. For these reasons,Kristeva arguesthat women should employ

a double discoursewhich reflects the real state of all identity; fluid, incorporating

both masculine and feminine and existing both outside and inside the boundariesof

the symbolic. She arguesthat women should be active and assertive(in the domain

of the phallus) but they should also question and challengethese assertionswhich

must never rigidify into the fixed symbolic. Women's position should be a continual

movement betweenorder and disorder. (66)

Roberts seemsto advocatethe need for the symbolic. In her poem `madwomanat

Rodmell', a poem written for Sylvia Plath, Roberts representsboth the bliss of a

receptivity to nature,to a place outside culture and the dangerof losing all defences:

she strolls in the valley, alone

her ears scanthe warning

twanging of birds

herboots plop andsuck in the mud'sgrip

the sky is a cold gold spoon

sun tart and sweet in the cup of hills licked clean by the gulp of cows

- at the cup's lip, the foam

andcrust of milk, a swell of clouds

and yellow plums; leaves curl

191 like the peelin marmalade

the world is her mouth

a sour swill of yells

trees scar, and suddenly

redden; bright berries of blood and teeth

hang in the hedge; the bad

baby is out; she

bites through the net; she swarms

free, fizzing; she thunders like bees in a box

maddenedfor honey, and her mama

her lips clang shut on meanrations: she swallows the river and mourns on down, a thin bellyful (AS, 10)

Symbiosisor fusion with the mother/natureis representedthrough imagesof feeding, hunger and desire as projected onto the natural landscapein imagery and rhythm which recalls Plath's own style. Yet this fusion can collapse us to a regressivestate of madnessand hysteria outside the symbolic. The referenceto the `bad baby' recalls Klein's essay `Envy and Gratitude' (67) and the processesof splitting and paranoia associatedwith the paranoid schizoid position discussedearlier: `Trees scar, and suddenlyredden'. At this point the positive identification of nature as nurture and satisfaction seenin childlike images and soundsgives way to

192 nature/motheras destructive and withholding: `mean rations' and `a thin bellyful'.

The masculine principle has its place.

In the poem`Going into Cornelissen's,Great Russell Street' an orgy of coloursattacks her sensesin a shop:

Then an ampouleof orangehenna jazzed with saffron yellow aswet sand a staffof coffee,of painbrule dissolvedto contralto rose, to a screechof lime sorbet.(PH, 57)

Sensesintermingle in a fluid and multiple way. This synaesthesiais part of Roberts' transgressingof boundarieswithin the self. Yet there is recognition of the need here for the intellectual, the rational, the symbolic of classification The bottles are classified `to render it bearable.'

Unlike the work of Kay and Boland where fathers are shadowyor absent,fathers have a significant presencein Roberts' work. Often embodied as priests they are forbidden objects of desire.However in Roberts' work this taboo is broken and both fathers and daughterscommit incest. In Impossible Saints, for example, Saint Thais is the young girl who acts out the desire for her father and is banished and left to die in the bottom of a well. (IS, 163-174)

193 In an article on father /daughter relations Roberts writes `To be free of your father,

you have to admit you love him, Really love him. In an ideal world, your father

would be able to admit, in words, not deeds,that he felt the same way. But in this

world theseconversations have a way of never happening.' (68) In her poem `A harvestjourney' Roberts affirms the significance of the father/daughterrelationship.

In this poem the personaof the daughteridentifies with the father through shared activities:

I helpedmy fatherpick andchop

applesand onions for chutney prune the beech tree with ladderand long shears.

He coughed rough spittle into his handkerchief. My mother complainedthe tall brancheswere cruelly lopped, that Dad's leeks hadwooden hearts. The stringbeans quarrelledwith the runners,the pot clangedwhile the iron hissed.

I cooked omelettes, a sort of blessing. (PH, 50-51)

Significantlyfood which is so oftenequated with the motherin Roberts'writing is here associatedwith the father. The mother is outside this bond, critical and

194 complaining. The mother's attack here on the father which contradictsthe warm and

nurturing presentationof him by the daughter reflects back on the mother herself

constructing her as the one with the `woodenheart'. The poem concludeswith the

strong affirmation of the daughter/fatherlove. The mother here is the outsider

reinforced by the different ways the narrator namesthem. Shetalks about `Dad' and

4my mother,' one intimate the other detached.

the smile and frown

of Dad in his old brown sweater

bringingbowls of spinach

and lettuces in.

Roberts' advocacy of both the masculineprinciple and the feminine principle is clear

in her celebration of a bisexual practice of writing. Roberts writes love poetry to men

and women. In her representationof the erotic she celebratesboth the masculine

principle and the feminine one.

`The best writers and the most generousreaders, I'd suggest,have not androgynous but bisexual imaginations. That's to say they resist simplistic `either/or' categorisation in favour of `and'. You don't have to choosebetween identifying solely with masculine or feminine experience,as you don't have to deny that these words matter. You can explore both. You don't have to believe in realist fiction at the expenseof the unconsciouslife; they fertilise each other.' (69)

195 Roberts locatesthis image of the bisexual imagination in the memory of her parents,

one English Protestantand one a French Catholic `so different in their culture and

religion and language,yet their books all tumbling togetherin the big bookcaseand

their words tangling and dancing at family mealtimes. This imagination is something

very alive and active and sexy going on in the mind. Not static. Not transcendent.'

(70)

This communion of male/female can be seenthroughout her work. In `Magnificat'

she celebratesa relationship with a woman who savesher after the end of an affair

with a man. In `praise blue' the moment ofjouissance experiencedby the narrator

embracesboth male and female sexuality. In Judith and delilah and me' she explores the erotic through the celebration of surrender;of giving up her body in a celebration of difference:

samsoncarrying gates is lonely

lay your handsupon my gates, grasp my hair, bury your sword, your fingernails clotted with sweet wax taste the honeycomb betweenmy lion's jaws (AS,2-3)

196 The languageis direct and erotic, the tone is playful and ironic. She seemsto be

acknowledging the power of male need for the female body and the power that gives women. In `the big man' she usesmetaphor to celebrateher desire in all its aspects- the big man is her circus performer, her spectacle:she calls the tune and makeshim perform for her. Yet the desire expressedis a celebration of the male and female,the active and passive.The use of rhythm and imagery in the final lines is celebratory.

The lines recall Plath.

I am a beehauling honey out

a fly tickling a slow fish. (AS,4)

This bisexuality is not the androgyny associatedwith writers like Virginia Woolf to whom Roberts has at times beencompared but the sensuousbisexuality of a writer like Colette, who Roberts herself acknowledgesas an influence in her choice of subject matter. (71) In her private life Colette, like Roberts, lived as a lesbian for a number of years while also having two marriages.But in her writing her sensuality comprised everything beautiful, not just men and women but animals and plants also.

This difference betweenbisexuality and androgyny is important. Both bisexuality and androgyny were related to the Greek myth of Hermaphroditus. The legend goes that the nymph Salmacisfell in love with the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite and in answerto her prayer never to be separatedfrom him, the Gods combined their sexes.Hermaphroditus himself was a semi-God, and veneratedas such. Androgyny has retained the ancient flavour of myth and religion and is often associatedwith creative energy and in particular writers such as the Bloomsbury group. The concept of androgyny is also related to physical appearancewhere bisexuality is not.

197 Whereasthe word androgynyonly appliesto humanbeings, according to Darwin

bisexuality is apparentin the whole of nature. (72)

In The Visitation the central characterHelen, significantly also a twin with a

masculine brother/other, expressesthe feeling that she has to becomeandrogynous in

order to create: `Helen gets up and checksher appearancein the mirror over the

mantelpiece.Her eyesare anxious, her shouldershunched. Her body hides itself

within a vast old boilersuit. To write, Helen always feels she has to cancel her body

out, becomepure mind. Genderless,transcendent, like a man.' (73) Significantly this

paragraphfollows a referenceto Helen's mother, the aptly namedMrs. Home who

has devoted her life to her family. Describing her exhaustingand demandingweek caring for her family, Roberts writes, `Shecreates endlessly, she weavesthe fabric of the home out of her very self, like a silkworm producing the gold thread from its marrow before it dies.' (The Visitation, 99) The positioning of these two paragraphs suggeststhat Helen needsto embracethe mother's body as a way forward in her own writing. The mother and the writer/artist needto be reconciled not held separateas western philosophy has done. In Sorties Cixous distinguishesbetween what she calls two bisexualities but she is in fact, I would argue,marking this difference between androgyny and the kind of bisexuality that Roberts advocatesand her writing embodies.Cixous writes:

`To this bisexuality that melts together and effaces,wishing to avert castration, I opposethe other bisexuality, the one with which every subject, who is not shut up inside the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theater, setsup his or her erotic universe. Bisexuality - that is to say the location within oneself of the presenceof

198 both sexes,evident and insistent in different ways according to the individual, the

non-exclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this `permission' one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire's inscription on every part of the body and the other body.' (74)

Roberts' bisexuality is then the location within the self of a split, an unstable division between contradictory elementswhich simply co-exist. The effect of this split is the creation of a mobile subject, containing both the masculineand the feminine. This self, the meaningof which may at momentsbe fixed, contains within it the potential always of moving on- acceptingrather than repressingthe other of the I within discourse.

Roberts also intertextualisesideas from Jung throughout her work. Jung incorporated the hermaphroditic legend into his archetypalimages of which the animus and the anima are the principal protagonists. They stand for the hidden other-sexedself and symbolise undying wishes and ideals common to all of us. The animus is the male aspectin a woman and the anima the female one in a man. They representthe most powerful forces in the life of both sexes.It is the man's anima which drives him to searchfor his love partner who correspondsto the female part of the self and a woman's animus longs to find her own male self in the person she loves. The soul- image which balancesJung's `Persona' is an archetypewhich can representthe whole of the unconscious.It is inherited, collective and ageless.Jung's work was concernedwith images of woman as devourer and destroyer as well as protector, conceptswhich came into psychoanalysisthrough the work of Melanie Klein and which we meet again in Kristeva's work. Indeed Jung's archetypescan be compared

199 to the internalobjects of Kleinian psychoanalysis.Like Klein, Jung'searly work

sharedmany of the tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis,however this initial union

gave way to conflict. At a theoretical level the two were in disagreementover

Freud's theory of the sexual aetiology of neuroses.Jung disagreedwith Freud that

repressionalways had a sexual basis. There were also irreconcilable differences

regarding religion. Freud was anti-religion whereasJung recognisedthe significance

of the spiritual and sacredto both individuals and society and indeedwanted

psychoanalysisto be the new religion. Jung saw the unconsciousas being the home

of creativity and as having a teleological function and this is clear in Roberts' work

also. The unconsciouscompensates tendencies in the consciousmind thus helping

the individual achieve integration and wholeness.(75)

Jung's stresson the creativity and inherent meaningfulnessof the unconsciousand

his integration of spirituality were attractive to Roberts, as was his use of feminine

archetypes. In an essaywritten in 1983,Roberts discussesthe attraction of Jungian feminism:

`I discoveredfour archetypeswhich exist within the female psyche: the virgin, the

mother, the companion to men, the sibyl. Most of us don't expressthese aspectsof

ourselvesall at once; we tend to expressone or two, to bring out the different aspects

of ourselves different in lives For long time I thought they at moments our ... a were all at in Now, I begin to the the lesbian/independent war me ... recognise virgin as woman who is sexual, free, maternal; the mother asthe woman who listens and receives and so conceivesnot just physical pregnanciesbut also spiritual ones

(conversations,ideas); the companion to men as the vibrantly sexual women whose

200 businessis not necessarilyto do with marriage and the bearing and raising of children; the sibyl as the woman who periodically needsto withdraw into what can be seenas depressionor even madnessbut who is in touch with ancient memories, inspiration, who is an artist. This system of imagery helped me to seethat sexuality and spirituality can be connected,need not be at war. ' (76)

Like Roberts the reconciliation of oppositesis a theme which runs through all Jung's work. In his writing on individuationJung uses the imageof coniunctio-maleand femaleconjoined-to symbolise the birth of the newself. (77)

Similarly integration and rebirth are often played out in twin metaphorsin Roberts' work, where the `other' representsrepressed or split off aspectsof the self which one has to embraceor acknowledgein order to move forward. For examplein The

Visitation the heroine has a twin brother who representsthe masculineside of herself. Quite often the twin metaphoris enactedthrough parallel lives as in Fair

Exchange and in a more complex narrative in Flesh and Blood, where the characters at times changeboth sex and country.

From Plato onwards twins have denotedboth union and separation;an extensionor mirroring of the unity of the pre-symbolic, a oneness/wholenessthat has beensplit in order to grow and thrive. In The Visitation the opening page beginsthe painful separation:

201 `The first thing that she seesis an enormouspale face, closeto her own. Not

having seenher own face yet, she seesthe other's. It swims, flat and round, like a

mirror with fins. Like a moon at the bottom of the sea. Blank. White. Shimmering.

Theytouch one another through curtains of skin. Theydance in the womb,

within their separatesacs, tumbling gracefully over each other like Chineseacrobats.

They stretch out their tiny arms, and waltz in slow motion in their world of darkness

and fluid. Two loving punch-balls, each a balloon for the other.

Their mother'sbody divides them. It callsthem out. Fromtheir happyroom

where they float and kick like waterlilies swaying on stems,they are expelled. The

world, their underwater cave, is after all the belly of the whale. Twin Jonases,they

shiver, unable to distinguish between earthquakes,indigestion, death. The walls of

their sanctuarycontract. A disasteris set in motion.' (The Visitation, 3)

Both Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysisargues that in order to separatewe deny

certain aspectsof ourselveswhich are projectedonto a mother. In her use of the

twin metaphor, I would argue Roberts exploresthe cost of such a split and the need

for integration and healing to be creative and fully alive. By the end of The Visitation

Helen, who has grieved all her life for the lost unity with her twin, achievessome

understandingand insight.

`The twins lodge simply, deep inside her, as imagesof different parts of herself, as

needsfor different sorts of activity. Shebegins to smile with delight at this

recognition of what makesherself wholeness dependenton twin capacitiesand twin needs. Out of the tension, the meeting betweenthe two, she forms the synthesisof who she is today. ' (The Visitation, 175)

202 In Impossible Saints there is a telling passagewhere sister Josephine,the central

connecting figure of the narratives,describes how shewants to set up housesfor

single women to live in: `Each housewould be a double house,looking two ways,

the Two housestogether, backto with one entranceon one side and one on other ...

back; two bodiesjoined by a single skin. But there would be ways through, from one

to the other, for those who lived there and had the keys to the communicating doors.'

(IS, 192) One side would be a type of convent but without Catholicism, allowing

spacefor the spiritual and solitude. The other would be for the social, the life of the

body and the senses. The housethat Josephineenvisages unites the spiritual and the

sexual and puts the earthly body back into religion as a celebratoryforce rather than

as something to be denied.

In various interviews Roberts has talked of her senseof being a twin and of how it

may have given her early awarenessof the other. `There were always the two of us.

We `the twins' To `I' to include `you' `she.' She how were ... say was and writes of it also made her woman centred:

`When we were tiny girls, we often shareda bed at night and cuddled each other.

That loving friendships important The early closeness... strong with women were ... feminist conceptof sisterhood has always meant a lot to me becauseI started experiencing it so young with my twin. It allows for competitivenessand envy too.

Sisterhoodis alive and active, not perfect and dead.' (78)

203 Juliet Mitchell, in a recent study of hysteria in culture, rereadsFreud's Oedipus

Complex by inserting the experienceof sibling relationships and their lateral heirs in

peer and affinal relationships into our understandingof human psychic development.

She arguesthat the intense love and hate for a sibling, a lateral relationship of

samenessand difference, uniquenessand replication, is experiencedas catastrophic

for the infant becauseit threatensher/him with non-existence:`An actual sibling is

the concreteembodiment of a generalcondition in which no human being is unique -

he can always be replacedor repeatedby another.' (79) Mitchell arguesthat the focus on the intergenerationalmodel of parentsand children has repressedthe intensity of the love- hate relationship betweensiblings and its consequencesfor adult lateral relationships. In Roberts' writing suchintensity is acknowledged.In

`The day the wall came down' discussedearlier the narrator recognisesboth intense rivalry - `There was one too many: / it was you or me' - but also intense love:

my sistercalling for methrough the cold years, the

tapping of the axes of love.

In Daughters of the House, the adult Leonie is waiting for the arrival of her cousin/twin Therese:

204 `Leonie was waiting for Thereseto arrive. She longed for her, like a lover. Her mind

bristled with knives. Sheimagined the edge of the blade, silvery and saw-toothed.Its

tip vanishing into Therese's soft flesh.' (Daughters, 3)

In certain religions the twin metaphor suggeststhe uneaseof division and the

possibility of healing. As Farmer writes, `One is the number of God, of precreation.

Two is the number of creation- the point where the creator splits her-himself to make

the universe and in due courseits inhabitants.But within the split lies the possibility

not only of good but also of evil. The medieval church deeply distrusted the number

two- it wasthe numberof woman:who dividesman. It wasthe numberof the devil

likewise. ' (80) In Daughters of the House a short chapter is given over to Leone's musings on the difference between one and two which echoesthis philosophy. In a reflection of when does one becometwo, Leonie expressesher uneasewith the number two and thus Roberts' uneasewith the binarity of Western thought.

`Two was an odd word anyway. It did not expresstwoness. It was as short, round and compact as one. Leone's formula was: one magpiein the same field as another magpie, both in view at once, makestwo magpies.She preferred saying one-and-one to two. Sheknew what she meant. Two was blurry and made her anxious.'

(Daughters, 97)

At the end of the chapter Leonie thinks about the two visions of Mary seenin the woods,Therese's traditional spiritual Madonna and Leone's red andgold lady, the

`coloured' one who representsin the text the repressed,the foreigner, the body, the

205 abject. How to integrate these two visions, the Madonna and whore, the Virgin Mary

and the Mary Magdalene, is a central concernof Roberts' writing.

Heating the Splits: Religious and Secular.

The dualisms which pervadeand underlie religious thought are one of Roberts

central themes in her writing. The influence of French Catholicism pervadesher work. In its sound and rhythm her poemsoften echo biblical texts and prayers. Her use of religious metaphorin a material and worldly context invites comparisonswith

John Donne. Her novels and short storiesare full of priests and nuns and religious festivals and rituals. Many of her early novels such as The Book of Mrs Noah (81) and The Visitation deconstruct and rewrite patriarchal religious myths.

In `StabatMater', Kristeva arguesthat only the church has provided women with a discoursewhich satisfies the suffering, the anguish and the hopes of mothers. (82) In her essay `The Flesh Made Word' Roberts also suggestsone of the attractionsof

Catholicism for women: `The great thing about the Catholic tradition is that, though it oppresseswomen horribly by naming them as semi-devils,it simultaneouslygives them a visible place, unlike Protestantismwhich simply ignoresthem. Femininity is so powerfully contradictorily present in the Catholic church that you can't ignore it. '

(83) Kristeva also suggestsa similar distinction in her idea that the blossoming of feminism in Protestantcountries may in part be the result of a `lack in the protestant religious structure with respectto the Maternal.' (84) Catholicism becomesthen for

Roberts a way back to the mother.

206 Religious languageand metaphor pervadesRoberts' poetry. We can seethis

communion in `The return' (PH, 61-62) where the poet as prodigal daughter returns

to the Anglican cathedralof her father which she had scorned.Unlike the grandeur

of the Catholic church with its incenseand rituals, his religion consistsof `prim

hats/andhabits' `grenadierparsons' and a `teapot God.' The return to the Anglican

cathedral also suggestsa return to the father on anotherlevel. The daughterwho

`scorned' his country and his house now returns older and wiser with her `battered

heart,' and seemsto have reacheda new understandingof her father.

My father leaps up

in the high space

andthe motherI thoughtwas lost

ricochets

roundhim. Strong

archesand vaults of flesh

enclosethem. These two make the sculpted air.

Theyare the architects.This design is their dance.

The return to her father also gives her back the mother she thought shehad lost. The poemcould be readas a recognitionof the needfor the symbolic,the law of the father. In the closing lines the daughterinvokes the Christian creed:

I believe in the big ribbed boat

207 of the upturnedchurch.

I believein the body:

the house

the man and woman build

with the sweat of love.

This could be read as a reactionarypoem but that would not take account of Roberts'

playful use of metaphor. The body celebratedhere is the immanent body created in

the `sweat of love.' This is a coming together of the masculineand feminine, the

French and English, the spiritual and sexual, the conscious and unconscious. In its use of imagery and register this poem, like much of Roberts most accomplished work, mergesthe religious and the secular.

In `A psalm for Easter' (PS, 73-78) she interweavesimages and languagefrom biblical stories with images of a woman giving birth. In her poem the Christ crucified is the woman giving herselfup to pain and extremes(death) in order that new life can arise. The religious invocation is clever and consistent.The hospital bed with the woman spreadeagledis described in imagery of crucifixion.

They hung you, my daughter on a metal cross.

Fromyour preciouswound your bloodfell out

208 thickly, collected in a bucket.

This parallel is reinforced throughout the poem with phraseslike `You thirsted. We

laid/our wet fingers against your lips' and `You doubted.You disbelieved.' The

speakerin the poem both witnessesthe birth and supportsand caresfor the woman

during and after labour. Shebecomes the woman's absentmother:

you cried out in Arabic and French

your mother-tongue,and mine

sometimesfor your mother

andsometimes for me.

Yet throughwitnessing the sacrificeof the body,the poet/personagets in touchwith

her own lost mother and all that that representsin mythic and psychoanalyticterms:

You gave to me.

You made me remember

my mother

how love lugged her acrossthe water and made her strong

how shegave herself up

209 how shelet life rip her in love apart, the nameof ...

The referenceto `acrossthe water' heresuggests both the biblical seasand also the channel betweenEngland and France which Roberts' own mother crossedfor `love.'

This connectionwithin herself, this knowledge that has come from watching the body of another gives her a rebirth.

On the morningof the third day love rose up early inside the tomb

Love breathedin my ear andlifted me.

Love setme upright.

Then love rolled the stone away.

Thenlove openedmy mouth.

Then love made me rise.

And I, who had died in this life was born back into it.

I, who had died, was risen.

And she who I had been searchingfor

210 wasthere. She was with me.

Shewas love's body:

alive madewhole again in me.

This connectionwith the maternal could also be the love of anotherwoman, the lost m/other 'alivelmade whole again/in me.' This loss of self also releasesher language, her `deadwords, ' from the sealedtomb. The connectionwith the mother createsa new symbolic. The poem again echoesKlein and the construct of creativity as

`reparation:'

how I thoughtI brokeher, beingborn

how I wanted to break her again and make her mourn how I broken too was ...

and elsewherein the poem

howthe daughters mustfind andtend

the brokenbody of love

211 must mendit, must make

reparation

The American poet Robin Morgan in her work `The network of the imaginary

mother' (85) plays similar games.A passagedescribes the act of nursing as

`Take.Eat. This is body ' by simultaneouslypersonal and political. my ... spoken not the god/man of the gospelsbut by a nursing woman to her son and by extensionall children. Biological fact and spiritual significance here becomeindistinguishable.

Ostriker (86) cites examplesin American poetry from this period of poemswhich explore through descriptionsof labour and birth a female death and resurrection pattern. In Toi Derricote's Natural Birth sheargues that the death and resurrection pattern of the labour experiencedescribed is one possiblesource of that universal theme in pre-Christian and Christian religion.

In her poem `winter sacrament'Roberts fusesthe languageof communion sacrament with the desire for return to the mother through incorporation of the other.

in bed, I shiver and fast in a snowfield of sheets lonely for you, my absentguest our snowflake bodies melting on each other's tongues

- the true communion(AS, 16)

212 The body dissolves of Christ into the body of woman - we have again in the final

lines the interconnection betweenspirituality and sexuality, diminishing the

hierarchy constructed betweenman and woman and simultaneouslydismantling the

inherent dichotomy betweenman/soul and woman/body. The symbol of communion

where the bread and wine becomethrough transubstantiationnot just the body of

Christ but also his Word becomefor Roberts the maternal body and language.

Roberts is no longer actively Catholic but that early indoctrination and the effects it

had on her permeateall her writing. Shewrites about her perceptionof God in

relation to that of both the establishedProtestant and Catholic religions. Both

Catholic and Protestantreligions have repressedthe female body, and the messiness

of the real physical body: `bodiesthat retch, leak, menstruate,piss and shit, vomit,

come ecstatically, are not supposedto exist inside a church and are generally not

welcome.' (87) This is related to Kristeva's notion of the abject which is central to

her presentationof the unconsciousimaginary. The abject is the repressedfemale

body, the baby's pre-oedipal experienceof its own and its mother's bodily products

which has to be expelled by the infant to createspace for identity in the symbolic.

Abjection then is a processwhich basesor subtendsall identity, but is outside

symbolic or cultural representation.With the onset of the castrationcomplex and the discovery of sexual difference, this disgust becomestranslated into a connectionwith the feminine as abject. For Kristeva the pre-oedipalmother is abject and necessarily hated. (88) Survival of the omnipotent mother meansmatricide-killing her in fantasy so that separationcan take place in reality. The opening lines of Roberts' novel

Flesh and Blood play with this idea: `An hour after murdering my mother I was in

Soho.' (FB, 1) The needfor separationfrom the mother leadsto the abjection of the

213 maternal body. Even after the processof separationis complete and the subject is

establishedin the symbolic, the mother's body is still considereda phobic object

becauseit representsthe presymbolic fusion of mother and child and therefore

threatensthe autonomy of the subject. The unstablenature of abjection (removedand

not removed, self and not self, attraction and repulsion) threatensdisruption, giving

rise to self-disgust, guilt, a senseof impurity and insecurity lest the abject break back

in. Fear of the maternalbody is transferred to women in general and results in

misogyny. Kristeva identifies three categoriesof the abject-oral disgust, which

enactsa rejection of the mother and thus a refusal of life, repugnancetowards bodily

waste, which suggestsan inability to acceptthe body's materiality, its rhythms and

mortality and revulsion from signs of sexual difference, encompassingthe taboo

against incest and horror at menstrualblood. What is threateningis the transgression

or potential transgressionof boundaries,the tainting of the `clean and proper' body,

the in-between, the ambiguous,the composite.

Kristeva herself in `StabatMater' returnsthe mother's body to religious discourse.In

a parallel text she setsout an intellectual analysis of the cult of the Virgin Mary with an impressionistic account of her own experienceof maternity. (89) The bodily reality of motherhoodbreaks into the formal discourseclosing the gap between theory and practice. In a similar way Roberts returns the real physical bodies to religious discourse.Passion is not somethingonly to be experiencedby a rejection of the body but by embracing the corporeal, the abject. In Roberts' work the abject returns through imagesof incorporation, bodily wastesand the incest taboo. In Flesh and Blood for example,the teenageFrederica makesa shrine to `Our Lady' using relics from the abject of her own mother: `One of her handkerchiefsI took from the

214 box in the bathroom, a pink one, with a crust of dried snot in the corner. A piece of

cottonwool... clotted with yellow wax. Someof her toenail clippings... ' (FB, 22) In

denial contrastto the of the pleasuresof appetiteinvoked by the church - the fasting

of the saints for example - Roberts gives us incredibly sensualand physical

descriptions of food and appetite. `The Bishop's Lunch' for exampleconsists of

`rabbit pate, scentedwith juniper... roasted pigeonswith apples and calvados,the

sliced potatoes and leeks baked in cream, the poachedeggs in sorrel sauce...the

figure of an angel sculpted from choux buns stuck togetherwith carameland then

coatedwith dark bitter-chocolate cream.' (90) Hence Roberts' priests and nuns have physical as well as spiritual appetitesand the two fuse. The Wild Girl is the most sustainedexample of this fusion. This unites through the story of the `other' Mary,

Mary Magdalene,the constructsof virgin and whore. In Roberts' version Christ himself has sexual appetites.(91) What Roberts is about here is the reintegration of corporeality and spirit. Roberts' idea of God is immanent and links to her senseof connection.For her, fusion with the divine is a physical reality:

`Each of us participates in the Creation, the danceand flow of atoms of which the modern physicists on isn't for God is the speak,which goes now, over once and all ... force that grows us and wants us to flourish. God is our eating and drinking and gardening and love-making. God is the energy in our bodies,their knowledge and suffering and love. ' (92)

Healing the Splits: Nature and Culture

This `force' and mutuality is explored also in Roberts' representationof nature.

Roberts' critique of the relationship betweenwomen and nature is not the essentialist

215 view of culturalfeminists such as SusanGriffin andAdrienne Rich nor is it the

romantic sublime of Wordsworth and the male romantics. The romantic sublime

deniesthe flesh in favour of the spirit. Roberts' `sublime' is characterisednot by

transcendingthe body but by letting go, by openingup the body and dissolving the

boundariesbetween self and other. Writing of Roberts' presentationof the

relationship betweenwomen and nature, Bertram says:

`The intimate telepathy betweenthe two doesnot replaceor obliterate autonomous

selfhood. In her poetry the woman's body strains out towards the world beyond,

hovering on the brink of dissolution into it. Letting go is the route to the sublime and

is an act of courage and faith. It meanslosing a senseof self, of identity, uniqueness

and individuality, but it is through this surrenderthat Roberts envisagesthe

possibilitiesof the sublime.' (93)

Ostriker, (94) writing of the revisionist mythmaking of much recent women's poetry

in America, draws attention to the social, political and philosophical values

undermined in such poetry. One of these is the faith that the cosmos is - must be-

hierarchically ordered with earth and body on the bottom and mind and spirit on the

top. In the samevein, women writers are not concernedwith immortality and this is

often mockingly deconstructedas a corollary of male aggressivenessand need for control.

We cansee this expressedin Roberts'poem `In the Tradescantgarden, Lambeth. '

(PH, 44-45) The narrator and her friend walk round the memorial garden named

aftertwo famous17th century royal gardeners,father and son collapsed into onein

216 the poem.Their memorial garden reflects their controland separation from the

natural and vegetableworld. Every thing is separated,classified, ordered according

to the rule of logic and given classicalnames.

The Queen'sman in his tomb

the scholar, the connoisseur

is a collection of dry sticks

hexagram hope spelling a of ...

Death, presidedover by the grandmotherspouring tea from funeral urns, separates him from the earth in his tomb and gives him the illusion of transcendence.His wife

Hester however representsa different model of life after death; forgotten, `mislaid':

Hersis the dirty alphabet of earth, the dance of atoms and of meanings,a translation betweenwords not worlds:her truth is vegetable, her sex linguistic.

The famous gardenerseems to have transcendeddeath - he has a memorial garden andhis bonesare preserved. However it is his wife Hester,Roberts suggests, whose organicalphabet contains the seedsof its ownregeneration and that of the garden.

217 Her languageor script is fluid, organic, continually evolving unlike the patriarchal

`script that writes/that separates.' In Roberts' poetry the `vertical standard' is

subverted. The body is not assumedto be morally or metaphysicallyinferior to some

higher principle. Robertsdoes not imply that this is wholly a femaleway of

perceiving - the `dirty alphabetof earth' is open to women and men: it is more likely

however, given the psychic engenderingof women, to be female.

Many of the naturepoems explore a pagansensuality often using religious register to

encodethe naturalworld. In `In the New Year' a journeyfrom Devonand the

radianceof the landscapecause the personato weep:

It all heavedup in me:

love, sobs,knowledge

the closenessof hedgesand grass

how the one body was both of us.

In London

cold beadsof water

marbled the indigo glass night.

The hyacinths

unclenchedblue fists.

You delved in, rooting me till our dark body sparkedwith light. (PH, 70-71)

218 The earth as metaphorfor the female adorns mythologies of countlesscultures.

Poetry aboundswith such images.Indeed feminism itself in the philosophiesof

ecofeminism arguesfor a rejection of technologies and the modernworld in order

that women can realign themselveswith their true and essentialsource of strength: a

pre-patriarchal affinity with nature. In its emphasison the spiritual, ecofeminist

philosophy is relevant to Roberts' representationof the natural world. Mies and

Shiva describethis spiritual element:

`Some call it the femaleprinciple, inhabiting and permeatingall things - this

spirituality is understoodin a less `spiritual', that is, less idealistic way. Although the

spirit was female, it was not apart from the material world, but seenas the life-force in everything and every human being: it was indeedthe connecting principle...This sensualor sexual spirituality, rather than `other-worldly' is centred on and thus abolishesthe opposition between spirit and matter, transcendenceand immanence.

There is only immanence but this immanenceis not inert, passivematter devoid of subjectivity, life and spirit. ' (95)

We can readRoberts' poetry in the light of the critic EstellaLauter who arguesthat women poets today are collectively generating a new myth of the relationship between consciousnessand the natural order which involves neither subserviencenor specialstatus for the human- it neitherabandons the ideaof consciousnessnor assumesthat consciousnessprecipitates a lossof naturalness.(96) This takesus back to Roberts'original commentson the importanceof `feeling.'

219 The Foreign Body.

This senseof immanenceis centralto Roberts' ideas on imagination and creativity.

Imagination and creativity must always be integrally linked to the experienceof the

self as embodied,the sensationthat we exist within our own body and not outside it.

Roberts herself, like many women poets, has had to learn not to despiseand reduce

the body. She writes:

`When I was young how ardently I longed to know God by personalrevelation, to

seevisions like the saintsdid. Later I transferredthis longing to the writing of

poetry- and indeeddid experiencebliss when a poem came, though I know now that

this is a feeling rooted in the body, the bliss of giving all joyfully that the baby feels,

when shitting for example! When I was younger and split the spiritual so severely

from the physical I couldn't tolerate knowing that.' (97)

Western literary theory seesthe artist astranscending the body and indeedthe personal.In `Restorationwork in Palazzo Te' (PH, 42-43) Roberts revisions myth to explore through her heroine Psychethe ways that male culture and languagehave exiled the female body. Like Demeter and Persephone,the myth of Psycheis much used in feminist revision. Psychebecause of her beautyhas alienated Venus the

Goddessof love who sendsher son Eros to punish Psychefor her beautyby making her fall in love with someoneunattractive. He falls in love with her himself and marriesher but visits her only at nightbecause he hasordered her neverto attemptto seehis face.Psyche invites her two sistersto her sumptuouspalace and they, eaten up by envyof her,tempt her to breakthe tabooby telling her sheis marriedto a horrific serpentwho is planningto consumeher and the child shecarries in her

220 womb. Taking a lamp, Psychegazes on her husbandwho awakesand rushesoff

reproachingher for her lack of faith. The myth then is one of forbidden knowledge

and female curiousity. In Roberts' poem, Psychebreaks free from a painting of

herself in order to revision it. Roberts' tone hereis ironic and detached.The modem

day Psyche wearsa white vest `againsther golden shoulders' and has overalls tied

round her waist. Wielding her bucket she startsto do restoration work on her own

`text' and chips away at her own `body' equippedwith her photo map and her pentel

pen. Significantly it is to her sisters she turns first caressingtheir `eyeswith a wet

sponge' emphasisingthe nurturing and relational aspectsof her project. As part of

her project to createa new model of the feminine subject she is commandedto

`Return to that house of desire/made flesh.' Having broken out of the symbolic, she

must return to the mother's body in order to understandher own bodily desires.

She staresat the dream.Level after level

of imagesfall past.She clambers up

four laddersof narrative till she swings free in the vault of darkness,the silencebetween sentences. (PH, 42-43)

The poem makesmyth concrete.Beneath Psyche's enquiring hands the myth crumbles:

Now sheis closeto the invisiblegod: pressingher earto a deepcrack

221 she hears him breathing.

Leaning over him, daring and disobedient

she hoists her lamp, clips it

to a metal strut, switches

the beam of her love full on

At this pointthe story breaksup:

the wall stutters,incoherent in a litter of paint flakes.

She records that the presenceof the male body

in the text disrupts it.

Her desire here is not to destroythe myth but to restore it, to find the text of herself in what is absent.In its celebration of the `silence betweensentences, ' its `listening for disturbances/ below the surface,' the disruption in the text of the male body,

Roberts is alluding in an intertextual way to the ideasof Cixous, Irigaray and ecriture feminine. It is significant herethat Psycheexplores the male body through touch with `questioning hands' and `fingers pattering', rather than through the gaze.

Irigaray has associatedvision with the masculineand touch with the feminine. (98)

To restoreher own `body' to the text, Psychehas to castoff centuriesof patriarchal imagesand narratives and only thenwill sheswing free `in the vault of darkness.' As the repressedof culture,the femalebody is equatedwith the darknessof the

222 unconsciousand it is here that she will find her desire.The poem then can be read as

an allegory for the femalewriter or artist representingherself and breaking free from

the myths which have restricted her through a return to the first object of desire,the

mother's body, her first home.

Woman As Exile.

A common theme in Roberts' work is that of exile/homelessness.Roberts' heroines

are often homeless,searching for a placeto belong. In Daughters of the House the

form of the text is an inventory of the house from which both women feel at times

exiled. In The Looking Glassthe heroine is an orphan for whom a house comesto

representthe mother /pre-oedipal. `Everything in that house was beautiful, to me,

becauseI looked at it with love; the househeld me; and I held the house inside me at

the sametime. ' (99)

In The Visitation there is a moment when Helen leaves her flat to go to an off license without changing her slippers-without signifying the shift from home to street,inside to outside. Aware of the staresof people she writes:

`The homelessare found frightening and offensive by those who do have homes.

They representlitter and mess,the blot on the shining white conscience. They are unable, the male tramps, the female vagabonds,to tidy themselvesneatly away into glass, steel, concreteboxes. They will be swept away, if found lurking messily on street corners, by the police, the cleanersof the state. Keep off the streets,the police say sternly to women alone, the unemployed, homelesspeople, blacks: and you will be safe. Rot inside, and do not dare to possessthe city as your own. Otherwise you

223 will be flusheddown sidestreets by hoses,sprayed with gasand rubber bullets as

though you are cockroaches,punished by fascistswith clubs, by rapists with knives.'

(The Visitation, 78)

The Homeless here representan abject, waste which needsto be `swept away.'

Helen too is homelessstaying in a successionof other people's homes,eventually

graduating to the use of her twin brother's flat. Yet for Helen boundariesbetween

inside and out are not threatening,indeed like most of Roberts' heroinesshe

embracesthem. Shedescribes eating breakfaston her balcony:

`This is her favourite placeto sit. The distinction betweenoutside and inside the house is blurred. She is still of the house,and almost of the garden,yet belonging totally to neither. She sharesthe privacy and the enclosureof the housewith the opennessand vegetation of the garden; she is the point at which they meet and overlap.' (The Visitation, 148)

In Roberts' poetry the house is often a metaphorfor the self or the lost mother or mother substitute.In `The Broken House' the suffering of the personais presented through the metaphor of a house decaying:

My sky torn down I'm open-mouthedto the rain.

Pigeons shit in the bath. (PH, 24-26)

The metaphor of the house again features in `home alterations.'

224 Your kitchen's gone

torn off like an arm

chewed up then

spat out in concrete.

Death whistles

stripping you down

to your foundations. (PH, 84-85)

In `house-huntingin the Mayenne'the narratorequates the homeand belonging with the bodyof her lover:

you're my house

as I am yours foundedon rock the hillside at our back

diving inside

soft walls of flesh

we open up rooms of secretwords pungent scarlet hot (AS, 120)

225 The referenceto the `softwalls of flesh' recallthe maternalbody, the original home

to which we all desireon somelevel to return.

In psychoanalytic terms all subjectsare estranged,are homelessbecause of the sense

of loss engenderedby separationfrom the maternal body and entry into the

symbolic. Language speaksfrom the place of the `Other' as Lacan remindsus, the

place where we are not. Languageis at once our home and the agentof our

homelessness,responsible for our separation.Some writers have expressedthe

particular statusof women as exiles. Irigaray seeswoman as always exiled from

herself. Unlike man she cannot recuperateher first love object, the mother, through

displacement.(100) Kristeva stressesthe particularity of women's statusas foreigners becauseestrangement dramatises the senseof alienation women feel in the symbolic. That is, Kristeva seesall women as foreigners, strangers,exiles or aliens in terms of their particular relation to and position in the symbolic order. In `A

New Type of Intellectual' she writes:

`A woman is trapped within the frontiers of her body and even of her species,and consequentlyalways feels exiled by both the general cliches that make up a common consensusand by the very powers of generalizationintrinsic to language. This female exile in relation to the Generaland to Meaning is such that a woman is always singular, to the point where she comesto representthe singularity of the

' (101) singular - the fragmentation,the drive, the unnameable.

This senseof womanas exilewithin the symbolicis suggestedin Roberts'poem

`Temporarilyresident. ' (PH, 35-36)A womandescribes feeling that she's`living in

226 the wrong house'sitting upstairs,ignored while shelistens to the noiseof the

television and telephonedownstairs.

Stuck in the speechlesslodgings

I hold my breath

to make the eveningspass

She can't even find solace in the kichen, because`a foreign body' blocks her way.

The woman is silencedbut we get the feeling she wants desperatelyto speak.Later on in the poem her `mouth kissesa cigarette/ so as not to embarrass'She is not recognised as a subject by the academics`tight-lipped as wallets' who don't notice her eyes. Sheis

Paidmother, paid midwife paid muse to others' words.

The poem can be read as a statementof women's senseof alienation within language and the masculine symbolic, silenced and marginalisedbut unable to return to the pre-symbolic, the mother, representedhere as elsewherein Roberts' work by the metaphor of the kitchen. The foreign body who blocks her way is the masculine body of languageand culture. Roberts is suggestingthat the woman must inhabit the spaceof the mother also, the kitchen downstairs, before she can feel at home in culture.

227 The position of woman as exile, as foreigner, astemporary residenthas its

potentiality however. As Kristeva also says in the essaydiscussed above, `Writing is

impossible without some kind of exile. ' (102) To escapewhat she calls the mire of

common senseand undermine the law of language,to revolutionise thought and

transform the symbolic, one must be in some sensean exile. The woman writer then

is well placed to transform language.

In Strangers to OurselvesKristeva writes: `Strangely,the foreigner lives within us:

he is the hidden face of our identity, the spacethat wrecks our abode,the time in

which understandingand affinity founder. By recognising him within ourselves,we

are spareddetesting him in himself... The foreigner comesin when the consciousness of my difference arises,and he disappearswhen we all acknowledgeourselves as foreigners, unamenableto bonds and communities.' (103)

Roberts, through her writing, attemptsto confront the `foreigner' who lives within us. This can be the `other' of sexual or of racial difference. In her use of poetic languageshe deconstructsdualisms and problematisesbinaries, embracingwhat is other, what is abject, recognisingthe divided subject within herself. Kristeva's theory of abjection has been used to analyseracism and xenophobia. Foreignersare often constructed as dirty: often this is a repugnancewith what they eat or their toilet habits. English attitudesto the Frenchhave often constructedthem as dirty and unhygienic while a colloquial phrase for menstruationin French is les Anglais. In

Flesh and Blood Robertswrites:

228 `The rednesswas red like her period. At home, when what some girls called les

Anglais and some her flowers arrived each month, sheused rags from old sheets,

torn up, to staunchthe flow, which she had always secretly liked. ' (FB, 54)

France has always representedfor Englandthe `other', attractive and repellent.

Roberts herself describesnineteenth century British cartoonsof the proposedchannel

tunnel which representit as the gaping mouth to hell, `on occasiona mouth

transformed into the devouring vagina dentata of the deepestmale insecurities.'

(104) Nineteenth-centurynovels equateFrance with moral corruption and dangerbut

also with sexual passion. In recentyears there has beensomething of a seachange.

Writers such as Rose Tremain, Pat Barker, Gillian Tindall and others are setting novels in France.Peter Lennon seesthis due in part to a nostalgia and desire for the rural life which Britain has lost due to its successfuland swift industrial revolution.

(105)

Literature has the function of both unsettling, estrangingthe reader and providing catharsis.It provides a psychological spacebetween inner and outer reality where the interplay between the two may be negotiatedand recognised.

I have drawn on the work of Melanie Klein in analysing Roberts' texts. A follower of Klein was Donald Winnicott and his notion of the transitional or potential space seemsrelevant to Roberts. Building on the work of Klein, Winnicott usesthe concept of the transitional spaceto explore the way in which the child who has experiencedwhat Winnicott famously refers to as `good-enoughmothering' is enabledto make the delicate transition from a mergedidentity with her to one which

229 is separatefrom her in the externalworld. Winnicott arguesthat the traditional

division between inner and outer world in psychoanalysisdoesn't adequately

representour psychic experience. He suggestswe needto include a third stateof

intermediate experience,a state where our inner phantasyand outer reality both exist

but which, of itself, is neither of these. This is the place where the subject and object

are able to mergeinto one. Winnicott makesthe point that the infant must be able to

distinguish betweenphantasy and reality before this state can be achieved. It is also a home or resting place for the individual involved in the continuous task of trying to keep inner and outer reality separatebut interrelated;where the interplay betweenthe two can be negotiated.We experienceit when we daydreamor when we listen to music or lose ourselvesin some artistic activity: `The intermediate areaof experience,unchallenged in respectof its belonging to inner or externalreality, constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience,and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencingthat belongsto the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work. ' (106) It representsa stateof living neither in a perpetual state of phantasynor a perpetualstate of imprisoning rationality. This third space,I would argue, is what Robertsachieves in her writing and calls on us to enter when we are reading.

By opening herself and her words up to the unconscious,by embracing the watery depthswithin herself, she invites the reader to do likewise. For a reader of English literature for whom France has often occupiedthe place of the `other', her writing

kind Channel. offers a of translation -a carrying acrossthe waters of the As Roberts asserts:

230 `The waters of the imagination transform us and our emotional geography,so that

she who was a strangerbecomes a neighbour and what was foreign becomesthe

place where we are most truly at home.

Our homelandis the imagination,also called Britain, alsocalled Europe: the land

underthe seafull of secrets,slippery with dancingand darting words. ' (107)

Notes.

1. Michele Roberts, Daughters of the House (London: Virago, 1992)p. 35-36; hereafterDaughters. Further referenceswill appearafter quotations in the text.

2. Julia Kristeva, `Revolution in poetic language' in Toril Moi, (ed.) The Kristeva

Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

3. Michele Roberts, Flesh and Blood (London: Virago, 1994);A Piece of the Night

(London: The Women's Press, 1978); The Looking Glass (London: Little, Brown &

Co., 2000).

4. Michele Roberts, Fair Exchange (London: Virago, 2000).

5. `Une Glossaire/ A Glossary' in Michele Roberts, During Mother's Absence

(London: Virago, 1993),p. 133.

6. Seefor exampleHelene Cixous, `The Laugh of the Medusa' in Elaine Marks &

Isabelle de Courtivron, (eds.), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester Press,

1981), pp. 245-264.

7. Roberts, `Une Glossaire/ A Glossary', in During Mother's Absence.

8. ibid., p. 164.

9. ibid., p. 177.

10. Elaine Showalter, The Guardian, May 11,1999.

231 11. Julia Kristeva, `Revolution in poetic language' in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva

Reader, p. 111.

12. Michele Roberts, `Writing and (Feminist) Politics' in Women'sStudies Int.

Quart., 2, (1979), pp. 215-218 (215).

13. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One trans. C. Porter and C. Burke (Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1985),p. 33.

14. Roberts, `Writing and (Feminist) Politics', p. 218.

15. Michele Roberts, `praiseblue' in PsycheAnd The Hurricane, (London: Methuen,

1991), p. 14;hereafter PH. All further referencesto this collection will appearin the text.

16. Michele Roberts, `Charity' in During Mother's Absence.

17. Michele Roberts, `Writing and (Feminist) Politics, p. 218.

18. T. S. Eliot, `Tradition and the Individual Talent' in SelectedEssays (London:

Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 13-22.

19. Michele Roberts, `Tradition and the Individual Talent' in Food, Sex and God

(London: Virago, 1998),p. 125.

20. Melanie Klein, `Infantile anxiety situationsreflected in a work of art and in the creative impulse' in Juliet Mitchell, The SelectedMelanie Klein (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1991), pp. 84-94.

21. Michele Roberts, `Questionsand Answers' in Micheline Wandor (ed.), On

Gender and Writing (London: PandoraPress, 1983), pp. 62-68.

22. Seefor exampleLuce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One.

23. Michele Roberts, `On Imagination' in Food, Sex and God p. 21.

24. ibid., p. 20.

232 25. Michele Roberts, Flesh and Blood, pp. 109-110;hereafter FB. All further

referenceswill appearafter quotationsin the text.

26. The differences betweentheir three positions can be seenin the texts which set

out most clearly their respectivepositions. SeeH61ene Cixous, Vivre i'orange/ To

Live the Orange, bilingual text, trans. A. Liddle and S. Cornell. (Paris: des femmes,

1979); Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexequi n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977),trans. C.

Porter and C. Burke, This sexwhich is not one (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1985) and Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language:A SemioticApproach to Literature and Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).

27. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language trans. M. Waller (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1984).

28. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1987), p. 26.

29. SarahSceats, `Eating the Evidence: Women, Power and Food' in SarahSceats and Gail CunninghamImage and Power: Womenin Fiction in the Twentieth

Century (London: Longman, 1996)pp. 117-27(125).

30. Michele Roberts, `Magnificat' in All the selvesI was (London: Virago, 1995), pp. 8-9; hereafterAS. All further referencesto this collection will appearin the text.

31. Michele Roberts,Impossible Saints p. 193; hereafterIS. All further referencesto this text will appearafter quotations.

32. Michele Roberts, Food Sex and God, p. ix.

33. Maud Eilmann, The Hunger Artists (London: Virago, 1993), p. 36.

34. ibid., pp. 35-36.

35. ibid., p. 40.

233 36. Melanie Klein, `Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms' in Juliet Mitchell (ed.),

The SelectedMelanie Klein, p. 180.

37. Helene Cixous, `Love of the wolf in Stigmata: Escaping Texts(London:

Routledge, 1998),p. 89.

38. Helene Cixous, `First Names of No One' in SusanSellers, (ed.) The Helene

Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 27-33 (28).

39. Seefor example Claude Tardat, SweetDeath (London: Pandora, 1989) and Alina

Reyes,Le Boucher (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1988)trans. David Watson, The

Butcher (London: Methuen, 1991).

40. Sarah Sceats,Fooa Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's

Fiction (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press,2000).

41. ibid., p. 169.

42. ibid., p. 171.

43. Michele Roberts, `Taking it Easy' in During Mothers Absence.

44. Michele Roberts, `Post-Script' in Food Sex and God, p. 200.

45. T. S. Eliot, `The Waste Land' in The CompletePoems and Plays of T. S. Eliot

(London: Faber and Faber, 1969),pp. 61-75.

46. Michele Roberts, The mirror of the mother (London: Methuen, 1986); hereafter

W. Most of the poemsI'm discussinghere are collected in All the selvesI was and so where possibleI will refer to this text.

47. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties (Oxford: O. U. P., 1995).

48. Maggie Humm, Practising Feminist Criticism (Hemel Hempstead:Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 1995).

49. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: W. M. Morrow, 1970).

234 50. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: TheMetaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Breacon

Press, 1978); Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres trans. D. Le Vay (New York: Picador,

1971).

51. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language (London: The Women's Press, 1987), p.

213.

52. ibid.

53. Liz Yorke, Impertinent Voices(London: Routledge, 1992).

54. Seefor exampleLiz Lochhead,Grimm Sisters (London: New Editions/Faber,

1981); SumnitiNamjoshi, Feminist Fables (London: Sheba, 1981) and Micheline

Wandor,Gardens of Eden:Selected Poems (London: Hutchinson, 1990).

55. Adrienne Rich, Of WomanBorn: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).

56. SusanGubar, `Mother, Maiden and the Marriage of Death: Women Writers and

an Ancient Myth' in Women'sStudies, 6,3, (1979) pp. 301-315.

57. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University

Press, 1982)pp. 22-23.

58. Luce Irigaray, Sexesand Genealogies(New York: Columbia University Press,

1993), p. 196.

59. Other contemporarypoets who have used this source include PenelopeShuttle,

Marilyn Hacker, Kate Ellis and of courseEavan Boland discussedin Chapter 2.

60. SarahPomeroy, Goddesses,whores, wives and slaves: womenin classical

antiquity (London: Pimlico, 1994).

61. HeleneCixous, `Dedans: Inside' in SusanSellers, (ed. ) TheHelene Cixous

Readerp. 23.

62. ibid., p. 22.

235 63. Michele Roberts, The Wild Girl (London: Methuen, 1984).

64. Gilligan, In a Different Voice

65. Irigaray, Sexesand Genealogies

66. JuliaKristeva, `About Chinese Women' in Toril Moi, (ed.) TheKristeva Reader

(Oxford: Blackwell,1986).

67. Melanie Klein, `Envy and Gratitude' in Mitchell (ed.), The SelectedMelanie

Klein, pp. 211-229.

68. Michele Roberts, quoted by Maureen Freely, The Observer,Jan. 24,1999.

69. Michele Roberts, `On Reading' in Fooa Sex and God p. 133.

70. ibid., p. 133.

71. Michele Roberts with Giuliana Schiavi, Writers in Conversation (London: I. C.

A., 1987) Video recording.

72. Darwin's view of bisexuality is discussedin Charlotte Wolff, Bisexuality: A

Study (London: Quartet Books, 1979),p. 200.

73. Michele Roberts, The Visitation (London: The Women's Press,1983) p. 99. All

further referencesto this novel will appearafter quotationsin the text.

74. Helene Cixous, `Sorties' in Sellers (ed.) TheHelene Cixous Reader, p. 41.

75. C. G. Jung,`Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation' in GerhardAdler et at.

(eds.) CollectedWorks, 9,1 (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)

76. Michele Roberts, `The Woman Who Wanted to be a Hero' in J. Garcia and S.

Maitland (eds.) Walking on the Water: womentalk about spirituality (London:

Virago, 1983),p. 62.

77. SeeC. G. Jung, Four Archetypes trans. by R. F. C. Hull, (London: Routledgeand

Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 74.

78. Michele Roberts, The Observer 5 May, 1996.

236 79. Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 2000), pp.

26-27.

80. PenelopeFarmer, Two or The Book of Twins and Doubles (London: Virago,

1996), p. 332.

81. Michele Roberts, The Book of Mrs. Noah (London: Methuen, 1987).

82. Julia Kristeva, `StabatMater' in Moi, pp. 161-186.

83. Michele Roberts, `The Flesh Made Word' in Food, Sex and God, p. 39.

84. Kristeva, `Stabat Mater'.

85. RobinMorgan, `The Network of the ImaginaryMother', Ladyof the Beasts

(New York: RandomHouse, 1976), pp. 63-88.

86. Toi Derricote, `NaturalBirth' discussedin Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the

Language p. 219.

87. Roberts, `The Flesh Made Word'.

88. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

89. Kristeva, `StabatMater'.

90. Michele Roberts, `The Bishop's lunch' in During Mother's Absence,p. 89.

91. Roberts, The Wild Girl.

92. Roberts, `The Flesh Made Word'.

93. Vicki Bertram, Muscling In, UnpublishedThesis, University of York, 1992, p.

194.

94. Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language.

95. Maria Mies and VandanaShiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993), p. 17.

96. Estella Lauter cited in Ostriker, Stealing the Language, pp. 114-115.

237 97. Michele Roberts, `Writing Daughters of the House' in A Virago Keepsaketo

Celebrate Twenty Yearsof Publishing (London: Virago, 1993), p. 71.

98. Luce Irigaray, `The Sex which is not one' in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de

Courtivron, New French Feminisms(Brighton: Harvester, 1981).

99. Roberts,The Looking Glass p. 39.

100. `Women's exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray' in Deborah Cameron,(ed. ) The

Feminist Critique of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 96.

101. Julia Kristeva, `A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident' in Moi (ed.), The

Kristeva Reader p. 296.

102. ibid., p. 298.

103. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves,trans. Leon S. Roudiez (Hemel

Hempstead:Harvester Wheatsheaf,1991), p. 1.

104. Roberts, `On Reading', p. 143.

105. PeterLennon, The Guardian, Dec. 30,1997.

106. D. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, (London: Routledge, 1971).

107. Roberts, `On Reading', p. 146.

238 Chapter 4.

Where do you come from? Strategic Identities In the Poetry of Jackie Kay.

Wheredo you comefrom?

`Here,' I said, `Here. These parts.'

These lines come from the poem `In my country' (1) where the black speakerasserts her right to belong to Scotland in the face of the questioner's ignoranceand racist assumptions.The assumedcontext of the poem is a black woman having to explain her `origins' to a white speaker.The reader assumesthe setting is Scotland partly becausethis is a recurring context in Kay's poetry but also becauseof the accentand emphasisof the final line, `Theseparts', a particularly Glaswegianphrase. This issue of being a black Scottish woman and the trouble society has with this identity is explored in much of Kay's work. However in the poem `So you think I'm a Mule'

Kay assertsa different identity and offers a different responseto the question

`Where do you come from?' Here she offers her own retort to those who construct her as `mulatto' and she claims a political identity as `black'. In doing so she challengesthe racist construction of her identity by insisting on the collective power of black women to fight suchways of being identified. Her identity in this senseis about women's political ability to define their own lives, and to produce their own definitions of what it meansto be a black woman. She also provides another definition of `home':

239 andif we know no home

we know one thing:

we are Black

we're at homewith that.(2)

What these differing responsesshow is the shifting and contingent nature of identity

and of `home' in Kay's writing. Home can be a place or a colour or neither of these.

It can mean family, nation, `race', history or the body. Is home fixed or always

shifting and relative? Is it always dependenton who is asking the question: `Where

do you come from?' This question is one that Kay herself has internalised and asks throughout her writing. As the daughterof a white Scottishmother and Nigerian father, adoptedby white working-class parents and as one of the few openly lesbian poets in Britain it is a question she has had to confront often.

Kay's poetry and writing has concerneditself with challenging such assumptionsnot only about the relationship betweenplace and `race' but also about expectationsof sexuality, mothering and other facets of identity. Reviewersand critics of Kay's work have also engagedin cultural reductionism, tending to emphasiseone aspectof her heritage over others. For examplethere has been a tendency to critique her style in terms of its black elementswhile ignoring the Scottish cultural influences. (3)

While this is a reading that fits well with the political emphasison blacknessin her work and the centrality of Britain's relations with Africa and the Caribbeanin post- colonial theory, I think such a reading is reductionist and does not take account of the strategic nature of identity which Kay's work explores.

240 In his influential essay`New Ethnicities', Stuart Hall writes of what he seesas a shift

in black cultural politics from a position of embracinga collective black identity as a

way of positively resisting the marginality and stereotypingof so much non-white

culture to what he calls the end of the `essentialblack subject'.

`The end of the essentialblack subject also entails a recognition that the central

issuesof race always appearhistorically in articulation, in a formation, with other

categories and divisions and are constantly crossedand recrossedby the categories

of class,of gender and ethnicity. ' (4)

Hall suggestsa recolonising of the term `ethnicity' from its use within contemporary

British discoursewhere he arguesit servesto disavow the realities of racism to a more positive conception:

`... a recognition that we all speakfrom a particular place, out of a particular history,

out of a particularexperience, a particularculture, without being contained by that position as `ethnic artists' or film-makers. ' (5)

This politics of ethnicity`predicated on differenceand diversity' is a centralfeature,

I would argue, of Kay's work. In her early poem `Keil and Caliloo' shewrites in colloquial Scotsof the difficulty of fitting into the categoriessanctioned by society.

you know the passportforms or evensome job applicationsnoo-a-days? well, there's nowhereto write

241 Celtic-Afro-Caribbean

in answer to the `origin' question;

they think that's a contradiction

how kin ye beboth? (6)

Her strategy hereof writing partly in Scots dialect, of using the linguistic markers of

Scottish national identity emphasisesher ontological reality of being both. The

poem also acknowledgesthe influence of women from both cultures on her poetic

development:

Liz was my teenagehero

OCH MEN and her stop and start rhythm

I'd neverheard of AudreLord then.(7)

Hall acknowledgesthat this shift in black cultural politics is not straightforwardly

chronological with one moment replacing the other and in Kay's work too, as in the

different responsesto the same question in the poemsdiscussed above, she

recognisesthe needfor what Spivak refers to as `strategic identities.' (8)

In this chapter I want to explore the different ways in which Kay's writing

interrogatesand explores identity constructionand the different strategiesshe usesas

a writer to upset establishedcategories, raising questionsabout the way we casually assign cultural values. Although I will be drawing on all Kay's published writing my focus will be on the poem sequence`The Adoption Papers'. TheAdoption Papers

242 was Kay's first published collection of poetry in book form. It receivedseveral

awardsand nominations and establishedKay as a more mainstreampoet. (9)

Although published by Bloodaxe in 1991, the poem sequencecalled `The Adoption

Papers' was broadcastin BBC's Radio 3 series `DramaNow' in August 1990. It is

therefore roughly contemporaneouswith Hall's work. It is significant too that the

work was received initially in performancerather than on the printed page as most

poetry collections are. It highlights the dramatic featuresin Kay's poetry and the

centrality of the voice. Kay has also written for stageand television and there is

between her her drama The considerablemerging poetry and . performative aspectof the sequenceand Kay's work is one areaI will explore in relation to her location as a poet, as it is an aspectthat is often ignored in critical reviews of her work.

As a poem sequence,`The Adoption Papers' (10) exploresin a concentratedand coherentnarrative this issue of where do you come from? Through the reaction of three contrasting narrative voices it exploresthe story of the adoption of a mixed- race child from the different perspectivesof the birth mother, the adoptive mother and the child herself.

`The Adoption Papers' is often referred to as an autobiographicalsequence. There is a dangerin this. While many of the eventsdepicted in the sequenceare basedon

Kay's life, we cannot assumethe poet and the woman representedin any one poem are the same.Indeed Kay adoptsa multiplicity of voices in this collection including that of the gay working class miner in ` Close Shave' (AP, 56) and a dialogue between two male lovers infected with HIV in `Dance of the Cherry Blossom.' (AP,

50-51) Nonethelessat readingsof her work, Kay very much locates the text in terms

243 of her own life and indeedat some readingsshe brings her adoptive mother with her.

She invites identification. Shethus rejects the emphasison the depersonalisedand

abstract in much of the poetry of the period laudedby the poetry establishment. For

previously marginalisedgroups of writers suchas black women or lesbiansin

Britain, the so-calleddeath of the subject andthe post-moderndismantling of

narrative positions arise at the moment when suchvoices are beginning to speakwith

confidence. To foreground the personalas Kay does in `The Adoption Papers' is to

resist and contestthe idea that intellectual excellencerequires depersonalisationand

abstraction and it is thus an important political text for making visible the

complexities of claiming a subjecthoodin a racist and homophobic state.

In `The Adoption Papers' Kay attemptsto give voice to her two mothers - her birth her herself. distancesherself mother and adoptive mother - and Kay slightly by the

technique of creating three contrastingnarrative voices, thus she tells her own story

in `The Adoption Papers' but she also createsnew storiesand new voices with which

to tell them. One of the three voices in `The Adoption Papers' most closely

resemblesKay's, the voice of the daughterwho is like Kay, both black and white.

The same story is told from these three different perspectives.

The use of different voices to challengestereotypes and expectationsis a central

strategy of Kay's work, as we have seenin the two introductory poemsdiscussed

above.While in performance it is easier to distinguish the different voices, on the printed page Kay usesdifferent fonts to distinguish them. This is necessarybecause although the voices have particular `accents'they constantly mergeand interact losing their separateidentities. As if to counteractthis Kay gives a chronological

244 structure to the sequence.She frames the poemswithin a sequentialnarrative which

is appropriateto a novel or a traditional autobiographyin its linear andtemporal

structure. There are even chapter headingsto eachpoem. There are three parts and

each part representsa specific period of time in her conceptionand life spanning

thirty years. Yet this narrative framework is constantly subvertedby the internal

organisation of the poemsthemselves which have their own shifting and merging

interplay of time and space.

Kristeva's notion of the two modalities containedwithin languageis useful in reading Kay's structure. The symbolic mode is that which the child directs towards the object world of other peopleand things. Here separationis privileged in the urge to master and control through the act of defining what is other, separateand potentially threateningto the self. The semiotic mode derives from the rhythmic, libidinal pre-oedipal memory with identification and continuity with the mother privileged. The dialogic interaction betweenthese two modalities produceslanguage as generativeprocess rather than fixed structure. As Kristeva argues`Writing is upheld not by the subject of understanding,but by a divided subject, even a pluralised subject that occupies....permutable, multiple and even mobile places.'

(11)

This subversionof logical structure highlights the inadequacyof formal structuresof representationto contain the complexity of the subject's life and aligns the work with both feminist and post-modemstrategies of representingthe self. However it would be a mistake to seeKay only as a playful postmodernistcelebrating the multiplicity of identity. Her own material experienceof the interactions of race,

245 gender, sexuality and geographicallocation make her wary of embracing identity as

wholly performative. As anotherblack writer, Toni Morrison, arguesthe postmodern

dissolution and loss of self is part of the black woman's heritage in the West: `from a

woman's point of view, in terms of confronting the problemsof where the world is

now, black women had to deal with `postmodern' problems in the nineteenthcentury

or earlier.' (12) While Kay recognisesin her writing the fictional nature of our

identities, she is also aware of the need for those fictions to give us a senseof

ontological security.

Where do you come from? Maternal Origins.

The central questioning of identity in the narrative focuseson the issueof genetics

versus environment and this is expressedmost fully through the conceptof what I

will call maternal origins. This interrogation of natureversus culture is

foregrounded in the opening lines of the poem where the adoptive mother feels a

failure in the eyes of society becauseshe can't reproduce `naturally.'

I always wanted to give birth do that incredible natural thing that women do -I nearly broke down when i heard we couldn't, and then my man said well there's always adoption

(we didn't have test tubes and the rest then) even in the sixties there was something scandalous about adopting, telling the world your secret failure

246 bringing up an alien child,

who knew what it would turn out to be (AP, 10)

The so-called `natural' ability to reproduceis immediately undercut by the adoptive

mother's failure to do so andby the introduction of the `test tubes.' The daughter's

first words refer to a `forceps' birth, reminding us of how culture managesnature

and already disrupting the binary.

I was pulled out with forceps left a gash down my left cheek four months inside a glass cot but she came faithful from Glasgow to Edinburgh and peeredthrough the glass

I must have felt someonewilling me to survive; she would not pick anotherbaby (AP, 10)

We arethen introduced to the voiceof the birth mother:

I still have the baby photograph

I keepit in my bottomdrawer

Sheis twenty-sixtoday my hair is grey

247 The skin around my neck is wrinkling

does she imagine me this way (AP, 10)

Kay's synthesisof voices here can be located within feminist work on autobiography

produced in the 80s. Texts by critics such as Estelle Jelinek, Shari Benstock, Susan

Stanford Friedman and Liz Stanley were all concernedwith the inadequacyof

theories or approachesthat privilege the notion of the individuality of the self

constructed in narrative. (13) Although writing from different feminist perspectives

they sharean interest in the problemsinvolved in accounting for and giving voice to

the experienceof a changing subjectivity and the ways in which individuals occupy

different and contradictory subject positions both simultaneouslyand at different

stagesin their lives. They all put forward the thesis that any text which purports to be

about the self, raisesdifferent issuesfor a woman than a man. Whereasthe white,

male, heterosexual`I' can assertthat it is somehowimpersonal, universal, that it

representscultural and aestheticvalues, the female `I' reflects instead the instability

of the self as the woman occupiesthe marginal position of `other.' (14) Feminist

auto/biography has also highlighted the notion of the centrality to many women's

experienceof the ties that connectwomen to others and particularly to other women.

Friedman (15) usesthe historical and psychological theories of Sheila Rowbotham

and Nancy Chodorow to arguethat the emphasison the individuality of autobiographical selves constructedin the writing processdoes not apply to culturally imposed group or genderidentities in the caseof women and minorities.

She arguesthat women, for both social and psychological reasons,are less separated from others and experiencethemselves as in community with and bondedto others.

248 The work of Chodorowand others seems to mevery relevantto a readingof Kay's

poemsequence both in termsof the thematicand the formalistic.

According to Chodorow the mother-daughterrelationship remains central to the

ongoing processof female individuation. (16) Building on the work of Melanie

Klein, she retainsKlein's emphasison the early pre- oedipal period and on the

relationship between mother and infant but locates the psychoanalyticaccount of

mothering not in terms of instinctual life but in terms of the social organisation of

gender. Sheargues that women mother girls and boys differently and they do this

mainly as a result of their needto recreatethe intimacy they experiencedin relation

to their own mother. This need is exacerbatedby their own subordinateposition in

society and how this is internalised psychologically. From an early age feminine and

masculine identity are differentially constructedaround the capacity for human

relationship. Becausethey are motheredby someoneof the same sex, girls grow up with more permeableboundaries between themselves and their mothers than do boys. Boys' path to separationis based on difference. Since primacy in patriarchal societies is given to women's caring functions, both inside and outside the family, the girl's capacity for nurturing is directedtowards her future role as wife and mother.

For boys, the expectationof their role as breadwinner meansthat their capacities for containment and detachmentare developed.Chodorow refutes Freud's claim that girls successfullytransfer their attachmentto their father at the oedipal stage.

Becauseof the father's lack of emotional availability and the intensity of the mother- daughter bond, girls remain attachedemotionally to their mothers and take this attachmentinto adult relationships. They thus experienceheterosexual relationships in a triangular context: a child not only recreatesfor her the exclusive intense

249 primary unit, which a heterosexualrelationship tends to recreatefor men, it also

recreatesher internalisedasymmetrical relational triangle. This is particularly true of

lesbian women, for whom she arguesthe love of women is an extensionof their love

for their mothers. `Lesbianrelationships, ' Chodorow writes, `do tend to recreate

mother-daughteremotions and connections'. (17) Chodorow's work has been

criticised for being universalist, idealistic of mother-daughterrelations and for

playing down the importanceof sexuality and in particular unconsciousdesire. (18)

Chodorow herself in her later work (19) and the use of her work by critics such as

Benjamin (20) goes someway to addressingthese criticisms. However her thesis

does provide an interestingway of looking at Kay's sequenceand also her other

poetry where the focus is on the relational between women, for example `Photo in

the Locket' (AP, 46-49) and many of the poemsin Kay's secondcollection: Other

Lovers.

Despite the chargesof both cultural and biological essentialismlevelled at

Chodorow, the emphasison the maternal and the fluidity of mother-daughter

relations also aligns her work with both lesbianand Afracentric perspectives,and in

particular the work of writers suchas Audre Lorde. In the Prologue to Zami, Lorde

writes `I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father and child, with the `I' at its

eternal core, elongateand flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother

mother daughter,with the `I' moving back and forth flowing in either or both

directions as needed.' (21) In `The Adoption Papers' too the triangle becomesfemale with the `I' moving back and forth betweenthe daughter, her birth mother and her adoptive mother. The poemscan be read, as Dorothy McMillan notes, as a collection

250 of love poemsto the adoptive mother with the roles of daughterand lover

intertwined. (22)

The structureof `TheAdoption Papers' where the voicesconstantly merge and

reflecton the `m/other'means that we readthe text with a constantrethinking and

re-constitution of the characters'perspectives and senseof themselves.For example

in `Chapter 2: The Original Birth Certificate' the perspectiveshifts from the

daughter'sretrieval as an adult of her birth details from the records office in

Edinburgh:

So slow as torture he disclosesbit by bit

my mother's name, my original name the hospital I was born in, the time I came.

Outside Edinburgh is soakedin sunshine

I talk to myselfwalking pastthe castle.

So, so, so, I was a midnight baby after all. (AP, 12)

to thatof the birth motherimmediately after havinggiven birth to her:

I am nineteen my whole life is changing

On the first night

I seeher shutteredeyes in my dreams

251 I cannot pretend she's never been

my stitches pull and threatento snap

my own bodya witness

leakingblood to sheets,milk to shirts

On the secondnight

I'll suffocate her with a feather pillow

Bury her under a weeping willow

Or take her far out to sea and watch her tiny eight-pound body sink to shells and reshapeherself.

So muchthe betterthan her body encasedin glass like a museumpiece. (AP, 12-13)

The searchby the adult daughterfor her birth mother connectsher back to her own pre-oedipal. Indeed the first poem in the sequenceis called `The Seed' where Kay as author/creator literally conceivesherself in language. The different voices reflect this also. The voice of the birth mother is much more connectedto Irigaray's notion of an `imaginary,' or Kristeva's `semiotic;' her phrasesare musical, her imagery figurative and her languageis connectedto imagesof water and nature. The adoptive mother's voice is very different, much more connectedto the symbolic. Her thoughts shift and merge but much of her languageis prosaic and expressedin the colloquial,

252 no nonsensedialect of urban Glasgow. The best exampleof this difference is in the

poem called `Chapter 4: Baby Lazarus.'

November

The socialworker phoned,

our baby is a girl but not healthy

she won't passthe doctor's test until she's well. The adoptionpapers can't be signed. I put the phone down.

I felt all hot. Don't get overwrought.

What does she expect? I'm not a mother until I've signedthat piece of paper. (AP, 16)

Baby Lazarus mergesthe two voices of birth mother and adoptive mother both at the point of exchanging roles. The birth mother is on a train journey; although we are not told specifically, there are suggestionsthat she is returning from giving the baby up finally. `My name signed on a dotted line.' Her thoughts are interspersedwith the voice of the adoptive mother as shegoes through the `journey' to officially becoming the `mother'. There is a time sequencefrom November through December to March although the words and versesof the birth mother are presentedas a continuousjourney or possibly the samejourney taken over and over again both physically and metaphorically. Physically as shevisits the baby still in her `glass cot' and metaphorically as she is hauntedby her decision and it impinges again and again on her consciousness.

253 The rhythm of the train carries me

over the frigid earth

the constantchug a comforter

a rocking cradle.

Maybethe wordslie

acrossmy forehead

headlinein thin ink

MOTHERGIVES BABY AWAY (AP, 16-17)

Kay usespathetic fallacy here to good effect, the voice seeseverything in terms of the lost baby; the train becomesa mother and all that sheneeds and is projecting onto her baby. The imagery connectsand mergesthe mother with her baby. This merger/identification of mother and baby is a key point in object relations theory:

`Mothering, moreover, involves a double identification for women, both as mother and as child. The whole pre-Oedipal relationship has been internalised and perpetuatedin a more ongoing way for women than for men. Women take both parts in it. Women have capacities for primary identification with their child through regressionto primary love and empathy... At the sametime, women remain in conflict with their internal mother and often their real mother as well. The preoccupationwith issuesof separationand primaryidentification, the ability to recall their earlyrelationship to their mother- preciselythose capacities which enablemothering - arealso those which may leadto over-identificationand pseudo-

254 empathy basedon maternal projection rather than any real perception or

understandingof their infant's needs.' (23)

This infant/nature projection recalls Ann Sexton's poem `The Abortion' (24) where

the personais alsoon a literal andmetaphorical journey of comingto termswith her

actof abortion.The voice shifts between her externalawareness of the mundane details - compare Sexton's `I changedmy shoesand then drove south.' - and her

internal consciousness.Although the speakeris at times lost in her thoughts about

her baby, the voice returns to the details of the train carriage showing the character's

consciousnessof being looked at andjudged, of having her life visible or `readable'

to the public. Her view of self is influenced by the way she perceivesherself as being

viewed by others. `Maybe the words lie/ acrossmy forehead/headlinein thin ink/MOTHER GIVES BABY AWAY'.

This awarenessof ideologies and the social construction of our subjectivity pervade the sequenceand indeedthe other poemsin the collection. Elsewherein this poem the adoptive mother commentson the construction of herself as a mother: `I felt all hot....I'm not a mother/until I've signedthat piece of paper.'

I forgot to put sugarin the flask.

The man acrossthe table keepsstaring.

I should have brought another book- all this characterdoes is kissand say sorry

go and come back,

255 we areall foolishwith trust.

I used to like winter

the empty spaces,the fresh air. (AP, 18)

Referenceto the narrative reflects her own lost relationships-her loss of lover and

child's loss of mother (in psychoanalyticterms both are the loss of `mother'.) The

poem endswith the birth mother having a symbolic funeral for the baby. After

burying the clothes she had bought for her: `A week later I stood at my window/and

saw the ' her ground move and swell/the promise of a crop, ... shegives a service

with rituals but shecan never have closure.

In contrastto this rhythmic elegiac languageof the birth mother, the voice of the

is her language adoptive mother is closer to the symbolic -she excited and and

dialogue with herself and her husbandreflects this.

Our baby has passed.

We can pick her up in two days.

Two days for Christ's sake,

couldthey not havegiven us a bit morenotice? (AP, 17)

Benstock's study of the relationship between genreand gender in autobiographyuses

Lacan's split of the `je' and `moi' to explore differences in male and female writings

of the self. She usesthe phrase`fissures of female discontinuity' to explore through the example of Woolf and other female modernists the different featuresof female

256 writing of the self. Gaps,shifting of pronouns,of perspectivesshe views as female.

In discussingmale texts she arguesthat:

`The whole thrust of such works is to sealup and cover over gaps in memory,

dislocations in insecurities,hesitations blind The time and space, and spots ...

dissection of self-analysispremises the cohesionof a restructured self. Any hint of

the disparate,the disassociated,is overlooked or enfolded into a narrative of

synthesis.' (25)

She seesthe white, male, heterosexualethic underlying the Modernist aestheticof

`impersonality,' the transformation of the textual `I' from the personalto the cultural

as challengedby writing which displays fissures of female discontinuity. Drawing on

post-structuralist work on narrative strategy she seessuch fissures as illustrating a

relation between the psychic and the political, the personaland the social, in the

linguistic fabric. She arguesthat the genre needsto redefine itself to accommodate

the social and psychic selfhood of women.

Kay's sequenceof poemspoints up this relationship between the psychic and the

political, the personaland the social, through its constant shifts betweenexternal

dialogue and internal consciousnessand dreams.Despite the marginalisation of the

male/fatherin the sequenceand the female nature of the relational triangle the law of the father is very much present.The patriarchal state hauntseach of the chaptersin its dominant ideology of mothering and the family. This is given its fullest expressionin `Chapter 3: The Waiting Lists. ' This poem concernsitself with the power of ideologies and the `agency' of the state to determinewho is a good enough

257 mother.The voiceof the adoptivemother recalls the struggleto adopta baby,each

agency rejecting them as not the right sort of parents: `we didn't live close enoughto

high ' a church ... we weren't enough earners...

Just as we were going out the door

I saidoh you know we don't mindthe colour.

Just like that, the waiting was over. (AP, 14)

Note the way colour is introduced as an afterthought. The assumptionis that no

white parentswould want a black baby. The effect of the pauseand the low-key `just

like that' makesthis poignant and yet dramatic at the sametime. If the mother is

subject to discoursesof motherhoodwhich position her in a particular way, a racist

state does not even view a mixed race baby as a baby.

The poem shifts to the daughter'svoice, receiving `official' details about her birth mother's identity from the record office. One sheetof paper- `Your mother was nineteenwhen she had you. /You weighed eight poundsfour ounces./ She liked hockey... ' What is striking hereis the incongruity of the few details which `create' in languageher mother's identity. We then move to `The Visit' of the social worker to the home of the potential adoptive mother. The style is witty and immediate with a strong use of colloquial Glaswegianand the constant repetition of `she says', `I say' inviting us into her narrative.

I thoughtI'd hid everything that there wasnie wan

258 giveaway sign left

I put Marx Engels Lenin (no Trotsky)

in the airing cupboard - she'll no be

checkingout the towelssurely

All the copiesof the Daily Worker

I shoved under the sofa

the doveof peaceI took downfrom the loo (AP, 14-15)

Again this is concernedwith the power of others to define your worth as a mother.

The immediacy of the visit and the mother's tension is conveyedthrough the

phrasing and syntax. Punctuationis only used by the social worker. The extract is

comic but sharply political in its representationof the woman trying to please-aware

of herself as seen andjudged by others with regard to personaltaste and politics as

well as class. She constructsan identity as the `good potential mother' which

involves removing any evidenceof personality, or any political ideals.

Gabrielle Griffin arguesthat Kay's poetry `speaksamong other things of the relationship between individual and state, and investigatesthe dynamic of desire and constraint which informs that relationship.' (26) The so-called `natural' and sanctioneddesire for women to reproduceis allowed in the context of adoption as long as the parents are deemedsuitable but Kay pursuesthe toleranceof this desire in the sequence`Severe Gale 8' which makesup the rest of the volume. Here the desire is realisedthrough lesbian parenting by artificial insemination in `Mummy

259 and Donor and Deirdre' (AP, 54-55) and baby-snatchingin `The UndergroundBaby

Case.' (AP, 62-64) Griffin arguesthat mainstreamcritics have beenable to cope with

such desiresin the context of adoption but can't handlethe context of artificial

insemination, which challengesthe norm too far and have therefore focusedon the

sequenceof `The Adoption Papers' rather than the rest of the collection. Certainly

the so-callednormal family is presentednegatively in The Adoption Papers. In

`DressingUp' (AP, 57) Kay usesthe technique of reversalto show the violence and

repressionat the heart of family ideology. She depicts a `real typical working classI

Scottish' family where the son is a transvestite.This is seenas the ultimate

transgressionby the mother who assertsshe would rather he `murderedsomebody

than that. ' In the final verse however we seethe real transgressionat the heart of the

family:

Ma ma didn't touch her turkey

Finally shesaid What did I do

I knowwhat they call you, transvite.

You look a bloody messyou do.

Shehad a blackeye, a navydress.

This strategy of reversalwhere Kay undermines and diminishes the so-called

`normal' family is a technique used throughout her work. We see it in the

mother/daughterrelationship explored in `Bed' (27) and also in the comical `Maw

Broon visits a Therapist.' (OC, 46-47) This reversalis similar to the techniqueof chiasmusidentified by Gates(28) as a feature of African writers from Equiano onwards and often used to criticise colonial customsand attitudes by contrasting the

260 true imagewith receivednotions of the samesubject and thus undermining and

diminishing this image.

Theconstruction of the maternalis exploredthroughout the poemin the voicesof the

two mothers,the adoptivemother who is awareof her `secretfailure' in beingunable

to conceiveher own child andthe birth motherwho feelsshe `had no otherchoice. '

This interrogation of nature and nurture is given its fullest voice in Part two; 1967-

1971. `Chapter6: The Telling Part.' concernsthe child learning of her adoption. The

child's perspectiveis mirrored in the use of the colloquial child-like dialect and

singsongrhythm:

Ma mammy bot me oot a shop

Ma mammy saysI was a luvly baby

Ma mammypicked me (I wiz the best)

your mammy had to take you (she'd no choice)

Ma mammysays she's no really ma mammy

(just kid on) (AP,21)

This is interspersedand mergedwith the adoptive mother's voice and thoughts. Both are dealing with the attitudes of others: in the child's case her lines are often responsesto invisible or internalised other children representingthe `norm, ' this comesacross in the defensivenessof her declarationsabout her `mammy': `my mammy is the best mammy in the world OK'. In the caseof the mother we seethe

261 internalisedattitudes and, in the playon the words`real' and`mother, ' the way

languageconstructs our senseof selves.

I could hearthe upset in her voice

I saysI'm not your real mother,

though Christ knows why I said that,

If I'm not who is, but all my plannedspeech

went out the window(AP, 21)

andlater

Now when people say `ah but

it's not like having your own child though is it',

I say of courseit is, what elseis it?

she'smy child, I havetold her stories

wept at herlosses, laughed at herpleasures,

she is mine. (AP, 23)

Yet thereis no wordto accountfor herin language,highlighted in the daughter's

`After mammytelt me shewisnae my real mammy....'

Much feministwork hasbeen devoted to the considerationof motherhoodas a social

constructor a biologicalcondition. (29) Whatthis sequencehighlights is the lack of a differentiatingterm emphasising how in modernwestern consciousness the birth andsocial mother are coupled.In anthropologythe term `genatrix' is usedfor the

262 biological mother and the term `mater' for the person who hasthe main social

relationship with the child, however defined. Yet theseterms are not often used

precisely becausewe have a whole set of assumptionsabout what a mother is which

connectsthe two. In Mike Leigh's 1997film `Secretsand Lies' (30) which deals

with a young black woman's searchfor and relationship with her white birth mother,

there is a scenewhere the women talk and the word `mum' becomesa confusing and

problematic word in their emotionally stilted conversationprecisely becauseof this

coupling. The maternal constructed in myth and indeed in theory does not allow for

this uncoupling.

I was always the first to hear her in the night

all this umbilical knot businessis nonsense

- the men can afford deepersleeps that's all (AP, 23)

andin `Chapter10: The MeetingDream' the adoptivemother asserts the primacyof

her bond.

Curiosity.It's Origins. ... natural. Thatkind of thing. Seeme andher

there is no mother and daughtermore similar.

We're on the wavelength so we are.

Right away I know if she's upset.

And vice versa. Closer than blood.

Thickerthan water. Me andmy daughter.(AP, 34)

263 The sequencedoesn't provide a simple answerto the question `Where do I come

from? ' rather it points up the complex nature of our subjectivities. In somepoems

Kay highlights the social and in others she interrogatesthe biological. The sequence

ends with a poem called `The Meeting Dream' and anotherpoem explores a dream

from the perspectiveof the adoptive mother. This seemsto me significant in the

recognition of the complex nature of our subjectivities and the part played by the

subconsciousin shapingwho we are. Dreams are given the same narrative status as

`actual' events.

In most of the poemsor `chapters' these aspectsmerge and interact through the shifts in voices and the subjectivities of the mothers and of the daughter. Shifts in time and place within one poem or `chapter' add to this effect. The internal structure of the poemsexpresses this complex and shifting subjectivity -of the mothers as well as the daughter.Does the sequenceprivilege any particular perspectiveon Kay's senseof self or her maternal origins? It is interesting that the picture on the front cover of

TheAdoption Papers is of a false-colour light micrograph of human chromosomes obtainedby amniocentesis.Is this giving more credenceto geneticsor heredity over environment or can we readit as an ironic comment on society's concernwith the

`natural,' critiqued in this volume and elsewherein Kay's writing? What is apparent is the symbolic importance of the birth mother and the weight shecarries for an individual. The final poem/chapter`The Meeting Dream' acknowledgesthis:

sheis too manyimaginings to be fleshand blood (AP,33)

264 Despitethe linearstructure and its containmentthe final poemis openended, there is

no resolution.The daughter'sidentity remains in process.The sequenceends with

the voice of the daughter still fantasising about a letter the birth mother will write.

Her sistersaid she'd write me a letter.

In the morningI'm awakewith the birds

waiting for the crash of the letter box

then the soft thud of words on the mat.

I lie there,duvet round my shoulders

fantasisingthe colourof herpaper

whether she'll underline First Class

or have a large circle over her Ts. (AP, 34)

Where do you come from? Home as Colour.

Both the voiceof the birth motherand the voiceof the adoptivemother are white

ones. When she is convincing herself of the strength of the bond betweenher and her

daughter,the adoptive mother says:

I listened to hear her talk, and when she did I heardmy voice under hers and now some of her mannerismscrack me up (AP, 23)

Quite literally in this poem her `voice' is under hers but also the daughter is connectedto other voices, the rhythmic and lyrical tones of the birth mother and the

265 voice of the absentfather and the part of herself which connectsto her black history; in the poem this connectionis madethrough the voices of Black blues singersPearl

Bailey and BessieSmith who the daughterand her friend listen to insteadof the more fashionable `Donny Osmond or David Cassidy'

Roundat herhouse we put on the old record player and mime to Pearl Bailey

Tired of the life I lead, tired of the blues I breed and Bessie Smith I can't do without my kitchen man.

Then we practise ballroom dancing giggling, everyonethinks we're dead old-fashioned.(AP, 23)

Kay grewup hearingblack blues singers played in her childhoodhome and Bessie

Smithis a recurringfigure in her work. In `TheRed Graveyard' (OL, 13)one of the poemsfrom the BessieSmith sequence the speakerasks herself :

Inside the house where I used to be myself, her voiceclaims the rooms. In the bestroom even, somethinghas changed the shapeof my silence.

Why do I rememberher voice and not my own mother's?

Why do I rememberthe blues?

The voiceof BessieSmith then is theblack maternalheritage that is missingfrom the triangleof the daughterand the two white mothers.The positioning of this childhood memory is significant. It is placed right at the end of `Chapter 6: The

266 Telling Part' which dealswith the daughter'sand the mother's feelings after the

daughter has learnt of her adopted statusand realisedwhy she is not the samecolour

as her adoptive mother. The voice then becomesfor her a way of beginning to

articulate her senseof being black. In a review of Kay's collection Other Lovers

Rodney Pybus (31) arguesthat Kay is strongestwhen least (apparently)

autobiographicaland more distanced.As an example of her strength he cites the

Bessie Smith poems.Conversely he assumesthat `the more personalcelebrations of

family and homosexuallove and loss' are autobiographical. Pybus's assumptions

here, although qualified by that (apparently),are problematic for a numberof reasons

not least his equationof poet with persona.His assumptionsalso highlight the

reductive way in which autobiographyis often read in terms of the external `facts' of

the individual's life. Yet the voice of Bessie Smith and what she comesto represent

for Kay is part of the construction of her subjectivity and thus her voice may be seen

as as significant as the voices of those who were part of her immediate family.

Audre Lorde used the term biomythography (32) rather than auto/biography to

suggestthe way in which our stories about ourselvesare always compositesof

mothers, friends and lovers. Kay herself writes of the feelings of longing and desire

for something unnameablethat the voice of Bessie Smith evoked. `I will always

associatethe dawning of my own realization of being black with the blues, and

particularly Bessie's blues Bessie's blues still fill longing. I ... me with a strange

don't know exactly what for. Blackness? A culture that will wholly embraceme?

Belonging? Who knows.' (33)

267 Friedman (34) in her work on autobiography usesRowbotham to explore the

construction of woman's selfhood in terms of de Beauvoir's assertionthat woman is

not born but made:

`A woman cannot,Rowbotham argues,experience herself as an entirely unique

entity becauseshe is always aware of how she is being defined as woman that is as a

member of a group whose identity has beendefined by the dominant male culture.

Like Lacan, Rowbotham usesthe metaphorof mirrors to describethe development

of women's consciousness.But her mirror is the reflecting surfaceof cultural

representationinto which a woman staresto form her identity. '

That mirror does not reflect back a unique, individual identity; it projects an image

of WOMAN, a category. In `The Adoption Papers' the image of woman projected

back is generally a white one. `Chapter 7: Black Bottom' is the poem in the sequence

which most directly deals with issuesof race and identity politics. The poem

sequencebegins with the voice of the adoptive mother. Although hurt by the racism

her daughter is encounteringat school, she is limited in her empathyand

understandingby her own positionality as a white woman.

Maybe that's why I don't like all this talk about her being black,

I brought her up as my own as I would any other child colour matters to the nutters; but she saysmy daughter says

268 it mattersto her (AP, 24)

The power relations that are built into the processof inclusion and exclusion have

been central in understandingthe significance of difference within feminist politics.

The adoptive mother, however loving, reflects the attitudesof white liberal society.

As long as we take the experienceof the dominant group as a universal standardor

norm then we construct the other as `deviant' We needto recognisethe particularity

of our own experience;that it is located historically and culturally and we also need

to recogniseour own part in the structuresof difference and how this affects us

materially and psychologically. Many writers have explored the needfor white

women to recognisehow our subjectivities are implicated in the myriad of

unconsciousand consciouspresumptions of the dominant group. (35) Dyer in his

study of representationsof whitenessargues that in order to dislodge whiteness from its it be `made `White centrality and authority needsto strange': power ... reproduces itself regardlessof intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly becauseit is not seenas whiteness,but as normal. White people needto learn to see themselvesas white, to seetheir particularity.' (36) `Colour matters' to everyone.

Interspersedwith the adoptivemother's reflections is the othernarrative thread running through and dominating the poem; that of the daughter'sdaily experiences of racism, her construction as `other,' as deviant and her agency in this situation. In the first coupleof scenesshe is taunted,constructed in wordsas `sambosambo' and

`Dirty Darkie' Insteadof takingthis passively,she fights back`I kneehim in the balls My fist is I his ' Howeverit is is ... steel; punchand punch gut ... shewho reportedfor fighting, labelledagain by the adults;

269 In few be juvenile delinquent. ... a years time you'll a

Do you know what that is? Look it up in the dictionary.

She spells each letter with slow pleasure.

Readit out to the class.

Thug. Vandal.Hooligan. Speak up. Haveyou lost yourtongue? (AP, 25)

As a child of mixed race she has lost aspectsof her `tongue.' The sequenceis in

someways a searchfor that voice. The narrative shifts to another scenewhere the

children are practising dance for the school show. Significantly one of the dancesis

called the `Black Bottom, ' and the three versesfocus on the teacher's racist

stereotyping of the daughter as having rhythm.... `I thought/you peoplehad it in your

blood. ' The effect of this on the young girl's subjectivity is cleverly indicated in the

following `My skin is hot as burning coal/ like that time she said Darkies are like

coal...' The effect is shown in that she can only describeher discomfort using the

sameracist simile as has beenused by the teacher. Her subjectivity is created

through this racist language.The simile also connectsher back to her birth mother

whose voice in this poem recalls her black lover, the daughter'sfather:

Olubayo was the colour of peat

when we walked out headsturned

like horses,folk stood like trees their eyesfixed on us - it mademe burn, that hot glare; my hand would sweat down to his bone.

270 Finally, alone, we'd melt

nothing, nothing would matter (AP, 26)

The poem also dealswith the lack of role models and heroinesavailable to the young

black girl. Although this is witty and ironic and displays much that characterises

`Glaswegian' humour, it deals again with the absenceof any `objects' for the young

girl to identify with; the searchfor a senseof identity in a predominantlywhite

community.

Angela Davis is the female ... only person

I've seen (except for a nurse on TV)

who looks like me. She had big hair like mine

that grows out insteadof down.

My mum saysit's calledan Afro.

If I could be as brave as her when I get older

I'll be OK.

Last night I kissedher goodnight again

and wondered if she could feel the kisses

in prison all the way from Scotland.

Her skin is the sametoo you know

I can seethat my skin is that colour but most of the time I forget

so sometimeswhen I look in the mirror

I give myselfa bit of a shock and say to myself Do you really look like this?

271 as if I'm somebodyelse. I wonderif shedoes that. (AP,26-27)

The cultural obliteration of her identity which began with her not even being

considereda baby:

They had babies first .. told us they no at andI chancedit didn't matterwhat colourit was

and they saidoh well are you sure

in that casewe have a babyfor you -

to think shewasn't eventhought of asa baby,

my baby,my baby(AP, 24)

has led to an alienation from her own body. There is humour and sadnessin the poem but what standsout is the connection betweenthe young girl andthe `heroine.'

Houston Baker, Jr. (37) refers to the `life crisis of black identity in a white society'drawing on the work of Richard Wright. It relatesto the moment when the black person realisestheir `zero image' in the perceptualschemes of the white dominant culture; it often figures in literature as the moment of looking in a mirror or at a photograph. Sucha moment is equivalent in Wright's view to other life crisis such as birth, puberty and death. In ThereAin't No Black in the Union Jack Paul

Gilroy demonstratesthe importance of culture both to the resilience of racism and to the processof resisting it. He considersthe prevalent cultural representationsof black people as deviant, as either `problem' or `victim. ' He arguesthat representation,including self-presentation,in speech,writing and music of black people outside these categories,as the subjectsof history and agentsof historical

272 change,is in itself a weaponagainst racism. (38) AngelaDavis offers resistance to

the teacher's construction of her in languageas deviant.

Rowbotham's examination of cultural representationin the formation of women's

consciousnessof self is particularlyrelevant to blackwomen. She argues that woman

canmove beyond the raciststereotypes to form newgroup identities:

`In taking the power of words, of representation,into their own hands,women

project onto history an identity that is not purely individualistic. Nor is it purely

collective. Insteadthis identity the the the new merges sharedand unique ... self

constructed in women's autobiographicalwriting is often basedin, but not limited to,

a group consciousness- an awarenessof the meaningof the cultural category

WOMAN for the patternsof women's individual destiny. Alienation is not the result

of creating a self in language,as it is for Lacanian and Barthesiancritics of

autobiography. Instead,alienation from the historically imposed image of the self is

what motivates the writing, the creationof an alternateself in the autobiographical

act. Writing the self shattersthe cultural hall of mirrors and breaksthe silence

imposed by male speech.' (39)

Part of the alienation for Kay comes from society's inability to connect both her

Scottish and her African heritages.She talks of this issue in an interview in 1990: `I can't separateone from the other. Other peoplealways try. Like Scottish people will either refuse to recognisemy Scottish accent, or my Scottishness,or they'll say,

`Are you American?' And Black people will just hear my accent or think it really

273 funny and say they've never met such a person before. And so being Black and

Scottishis alwaystreated as a kind of anomaly,which I supposeit is.' (40)

Where Do You Come From?: Scotland

In the poem `Black Bottom' the daughterin responseto the teacher's racist comment

asks herself `What Is In My Blood? '(AP, 25) This question is taken up in the final

section of the poem where the daughteris now a young adult and is trying to make

contact with her birth mother. In `Chapter 8: Generations.' the daughter ruminates

on her genetic heritage.

I have my parents who are not of the sametree

and you keep trying to make it matter,

the blood,the tie, the passingdown

generations.

We all have our contradictions,

the ones with the mother's nose and father's eyes

have them;

the blood does not bind confusion,

yet I confessto my contradiction

I want to know my blood....

It is the well, the womb,the fuckingseed.

Here,I am far enoughaway to wonder- what were their faces like who weremy grandmothers

274 what were their days like

passedin Scotland

the land I come from

the soil in my blood. (AP, 29)

The desire `to know my blood' despitethe intellectual awarenessof the limitations

of sucha desire,recalls Boland's `contrary passionto be whole. ' (41) Both poets are

in different ways consciousof the fictional nature of suchpositionings but feel

strongly the seductionsof such narrativesof belonging and `home'.

This phrase`the soil in my blood' suggeststhe importanceof her highland heritage

as part of her senseof herself, the physical place as a mark of her history.

Contemporary Scotland is a presencethroughout Kay's writing and the accents in

`The Adoption Papers' are all Scottishones. The two mothers voice different

Scottish languages:the Highland voice of the birth mother and the Lowland voice of the adoptive mother. The voice of the birth mother is the lyrical, musical one symbolising loss and dispossession.Her languageis more traditionally poetic in form possibly signifying her highland roots in a more `primitive' oral tradition. In

`Baby Lazarus' she travels to Edinburgh, the site of power, of official discourseto give up her rights to her progeny. The voice of the adoptive mother is prosaic, urban

Glaswegian. While the adoptive mother is a working classcommunist, subversive and critical of dominant ideologies of mothering, she is nonethelessa more `suitable' mother. This is a reminder that Scotland does not talk with one voice. Like `The

Adoption Papers' Scottish literature is polyphonic and includes Gaelic, Doric Scots,

275 Lallans, and regional varieties of standardEnglish, all representingdifferent regions

and cultural influences.

The daughter's `hybridity' then is not just constructedof black and white but of

those different influences, the narrativesof place of the two mothers. The language

of the Birth mother then can be connectedboth to the `primitive' of the imaginary

and to the dispossessedvoice of the highland woman, connectingboth patriarchal

and colonial repression.The daughter shifts betweenthem, at times prosaic and

humorous like her adoptive mother and at times poetic and wistful, closer to the

voice of her birth mother. Just as she shifts betweenblack and white.

Thesedifferent Scottishheritages are important in recognisingthe complexity of

identity explored in Kay's writing. As a mixed-racewriter Kay's writing is often

seenin a post-colonial context but the specificity of her Scottishheritage(s) is

usually ignored and Kay is seenas a Black British writer. A survey of anthologies

illustrates this cultural reductionism. Kay's writing has consistently appearedin

severalanthologies of black/African writing in Britain (42) but rarely is she even now included in Scottish anthologies,despite recently being awardeda D. Phil. from

Stirling University for servicesto Scottishwriting. The Penguin modern poets series which brings out paperbackeditions consisting of a selection of three poets published both a black collection and a Scottishone in the sameyear. Kay unsurprisingly appearedagain in the black collection. Despite the increasinguse of colloquial Scots in her work and in her last volume direct engagementwith Scotland as a subject, post-devolution anthologiesstill exclude her. (43) There are some notable exceptionsto this in criticism from women critics, for exampleHelen Kidd

276 who locates Kay as a Scottishwoman writer becauseof her insistenceon diverse

rather than essentialidentity (44) and in critical anthologiespublished in Scotland

she is beginning to get some recognition. (45) Attention to the Scottishcontext of her

work needsto be paid if we are not to replicate the assumptionsof the questionerin

`in my country' or the official discourseof Cail and Kaliloo where to be Afro-Celtic

is not allowed.

As Robert Crawford (46) argues,in issuesof cultural difference there is a tendency

to focus on that which is perceivedas most `other' and smaller provincial cultures,

closer geographically to the so-calledcentre, are ignored. With Kay who is half

Nigerian and half-Scottish it is more topical to concentrateon the possible African

heritage rather than locate her as a Scottishwriter negotiating anglocentricity. This in

itself replicatesthe cultural imperialism that has characterisedEngland's relations

with Scotland and its culture. This relationship is a complex and contestedone and

hinges on the extent to which Scotlandcan be seen as a colonised country. Certainly

nationalist history would construct it so. Yet as Linda Colley (47) and others show,

Scotland has an impressive history as a coloniser also. The Act of Union of 1707,

which incorporatedthe ScottishParliament into Westminster,created a

imperial institutional in superstructureof Britishness - cultural, and - which remained place for nearly 300 years. Although in 1997 the large majority of the Scottish peoplevoted in favour of establishinga ScottishParliament, this was not always the caseduring earlier periods of Scottishhistory during which Britishness was a much strongerpart of Scotsidentity.

277 Why was this? Firstly becausefor most of the period of the Union being British

meant prosperity for the elite in Scotland.The successand economic and cultural

dominance of the English meant that many of the Scots gentry in particular made

their way through alternative routes provided by the British state. Both Scotsand

Irish were over-representedin the officer classof the army and among imperial

explorers, administratorsand imperial merchants.Success in the wars against

France, acquisition of the global empire and early industrialisation helped create

fabulous political and economic opportunities.The elite of England, Scotlandand

Wales was bound together in a commonproject of imperial conquest,administration

and trade. (48) Paradoxically then it was Britain's successas a colonising country

which helped it consolidate its cultural imperialism over Scotland.Ernst Gellner's

account of nation formation is particularly apt here. Gellner seeshomogenisation and

industrialisation as allied forces in the creation of a nation. '... any state that is

undergoing modernisationand developsmassive bureaucratic systems must create a

homogenising centrally determinedmass education system that effectively imposes a single system from above. Minority, folk and peripheral languagesand cultures are effectively squeezedout or are actively quashedto createa single, massculture. ' (49)

In Other Lovers Kay explores the loss of languagewhich does not fit into the dominant order or culture.

distance

betweenone language and another, one

278 culture and another; one religion

and another.The little languages

squashed,stamped upon, cleared out

to make way

for the big one, better tongue.

Thesethings happen

between

time (OL, 20-21)

This could aptly apply to the Scottish language.Crawford (50) illustrates how in

18th century Scotlandafter the union much attention was paid to the eradicationof

Scottish linguistic indicators. To fit into the Britain created by the Act of Union

meant to becomeassimilated into English speechpatterns. This necessarily

contributed to the division betweenlowland and highland Scots, a division

dramatisedin the different accentsof the mothers in `The Adoption Papers.' Scots

themselvesinternalised the view of their languageas provincial and barbarian.

The teaching and development of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in Scottish universities

ironically reinforced this, emphasisingas models certain kinds of literary English

writing and promoting models for the developmentof Scottish culture which were

Anglocentric. To succeedas `British' meant the promotion of the study of a canon whose works were by and large the literary embodiment of English metropolitan taste. This promotion of certain types of literature representedan attack on the

Scottish vernaculartradition. Scots becamethe languageof the oral, English of the written. At the sametime as Scots was gradually being eroded and reduced to an

279 embarrassingaccent, Gaelic was being destroyedas a national language.The defeat

of the clans at Culloden in 1746 was hammeredhome with a disarming act that took

away distinctively highland dress and music. Having deprived the Highlanders of

their cultural identity they were then deprived of their homesby Scottish and English

landlords so that their land could be used for sheep.(51) As well as benefitting from

colonialism then Scotlandhad its own diasporaoriginating in the Highland

clearancesof the 18thand 19thcenturies. The circumstancesof the Clearances

illustrate well the complexity of Scotland'shistory as both colonised and coloniser.

As Berthold Schoene-Harwoodpoints out, althoughthe clearanceswere instigated

by the English imperial centre in further attemptsto colonisethe remoter regionsof

Britain, `most of the immediate agentsor perpretatorsof the evictions were

anglicised Lowlanders.' (52) Schoene-Harwoodargues that the reasonthey made

suchwilling accomplicesto imperialism was their own senseof dislocatedidentity brought about by the cultural imperialism of England since the Union. What is particularly ironic here is that the very highland symbols that were bannedand constructed as barbarian,namely kilt, tartan and Gaelic languagewere then appropriatedby the lowlanders as a signifier of `pure, uncontaminatedScottishness' in the nineteenth-century.Harwood refersto this processas `an expedient assimilation of the native other in order to strengthenone's own culturally emaciated self.' (53) Hence what we think of as traditionally Scottishmay in fact be a function of English imperialism.

`Assembledand appropriated under English pressure by the ScottishLowlanders from - andat the expenseof - Highlandculture, it reflectsthe imperialcentre's desireto eradicateinconvenient differences amongst its othersby collapsingthem

280 into one. A distinctively different, yet in itself homogenousother is far easier to

control than someoneof many different, potentially subversivefaces, or someone

whose culture displays more similarities than dissimilarities with one's own. The

very moment the Lowlanders donnedthe Highland kilt and thus allowed

Scottishnessto becomevisibly unmistakable,the Englishcolonisation of Scotland-

its re-'fashioning'into somekind of easilyidentifiable, slightly quainttribal

(br)otherin the north - wascomplete. ' (54)

The tartanwhich hasbecome so emblematicof Scottishdistinctiveness was in fact

reintroduced by Sir Walter Scott who stage-managedthe visit of the English king,

George 4t` to Edinburgh in 1822. It was then taken up by the British Army in its

creation of military tartan as battle dress for its Scottishrecruits; tartan no longer symbolised barbarity but was now associatedwith heroic martial prowess.So King and army were the initiators of the creation of tartan as symbol of Scottishrather than Highland identity. This processis similar to that describedby Boland in

`Daughtersof Colony' (55) where the tradition of Irish women lament poets was transmogrified into written romantic ballads, in part by Irish revivalists, in order to counter colonial stereotypesof the Irish as brutish and ignorant and make them safe and acceptableto the colonisers.

Part of the reluctanceto locate Kay as a Scottishwriter comes from those myths of

Scottish culture propagatedby both those outside and within the Scottishcultural centre. The cultural reductionism inherent in English canonical studies has often reduced Scottish literature to the romantic and the naive best exemplified by the national poet Burns. In `The Adoption Papers' (AP, 14) the prospectivemother

281 leavesout her bustof Bums asa symbolof acceptableconformity. Yet, asCrawford

pointsout, Burns is a primeexample of the complexityand contradictions of

different myths and identities:

`He is the often republican libertine who becomesthe icon of a respectable

Presbyterian monarchy. He is the widely read, socially adept, calculating individual

who achievesstar statusby being welcomed as a naive peasant. Robert Burns, like

Scotland, is where extremesmeet. ' (56)

One of the two features(57) of Scottish literature most often identified in histories could equally be useful in looking at Kay's work. The polyphonic emphasisin her work is often seen as a feature of black writing, yet it fits well with a tradition where to write in a variety of accentsbecame one of the hallmarks of modern Scottish literature. Crawford and Bold arguethat Scotswriters like Burns and Walter Scott developed `Britishness' in their work by writing in different languagesand dialects simultaneously, lowland Scots, standardEnglish etc. The double identity of women fiction writers in the early nineteenthcentury in terms of different accentsis explored by Carol Anderson and Aileen Riddell. (58) WhereasEnglish literature remained relatively unaffected by the creation of Britain, Scottish literature becamea fusion of different accentsand voices. This has continued into the twentieth century with the synthetic Scots of McDiarmid to the Glasgow patois of poets such as Tom

Leonard and the poetry of Kathleen Jamie.

In her mostrecent poetry collection, Off Colour,Kay exploresboth the racismof

Scotlandand its differencefrom England.Of all Kay's collectionsof poetrythis is

282 the one that engagesmost directly with Scotland both as location and theme. It is

also the collection where she writes more poemsin Scots dialect than any other. As

Mcmillan points out while in Scottish poetry of the eighteenthand nineteenth

century preserversof the vernacularwere often women poets, from McDiarmid on

mappers of the vernacular have generally been men and it becamepart of a particular

masculinist political agenda.(59) In recent yearsalthough poets such as Sheena

Blackhall and Ellie McDonald write in the North East vernacularand Alison

Kermack in that of the West and more specifically Glasgow, the majority of Scottish

female poets like Kay use Scots in a dialogue with standardEnglish. (60) Use of both vernacular Scots andEnglish can be seenin many of the poemsin Off Colour.

The title of the collection Off Colour relatesto the theme of sicknessand decay which runs through the collection and at times becomesa metaphorfor racism and intolerance.

The opening poem `WhereIt Hurts' (OC, 9-12) may easily be read as Alison

Lumsden (61) points out as a `metaphorfor Scotland'sown particular ailments.' A long poem written in the first personnarrative it reads almost like a traditional lament. The voice lists its bodily symptomsof ill health, bitter and complaining, the languageand soundsbecoming harsherand harsher.Throughout there are references to Scottish history and tradition. In the following lines both Scotland's geography and one of the Scotsmost often cited characteristics,their inability to enjoy the presentand celebratesuccess, is invoked:

sincethe rain of the frogs,cats and dogs.

I couldthrow myselfup andnever come back.

283 Chuckmyself into the sea,the North Sea.

The blackwater would gulp me down,whole.

I don't think I'd so much as wave,

I'm that sickenedwith myself. Sick.

Sick. Sick. Sick to deathof being sick.

Always spoiling everybody's fun.

Lying down whenpeople are up andabout.

In a dark room, when people are laughing in light.

Scotland'sliteral sicknesses,poor diet, diabetesand heart disease are there too. The

speakeris:

Sick to the back Scotch teeth.

I could spit my teeth out on stone floor - too manyscones, treacle scones, fruit scones, currant loaf, malt loaf. Crumble. Too much sponge, light sponge,heavy sponge. Dumpling. Shortbread- too many rhubarb tarts, custardcreams, eclairs.

My blood sugaris soaring. My tongueis so sugary

I flatter my enemies. My healthy, blooming enemies.

I say sweet things when I want to weep and spit.

Theytell me I'm lookingwell; lies- I'm peelie-wally!

Lumsdensuggests that the reasonfor the sicknessis Scotland's`sense of alienation, a rupture from its own communal past', (62) suggestedin the lines:

284 How did I get like this? So far away from myself.

I used to love ballads, folksongs.

I will go I will go when thefighting is over.

But the fighting of the body is never over.

Yet this seemstoo simplistic particularly given the presentationof Scotland's racist

past in the poem `Christian Sanderson'(OC, 28) and its continuing intolerant present

in the Broons sequence.To understandwhat is wrong with Scotland we have to pay

attention to Kay's use of body metaphor.The body hereis not identified as either

female or male so Kay does not appropriatethe female body as motherland.Indeed

in its imagery it is suggestiveof a male voice: `My neck is as stiff as a donkey's

I've beganto think in I ' The Scotland cock ... obscenities, can't stop-cunt. exemplified in the ballad `I will go' and the other songssuch as the Skye Boat Song is an important narrative but is no longer connectedto either the modern body politic of Scotland or the literal bodies of its people. Scotland needsto move on, to stop living in the past: `I hoard painful memories;/I nursegrievances; I don't forgive; I take offence easily.' and to look outwards instead of inwards: `My neck is as stiff as a donkey's cock/1 can only turn round this far... ' The speakerwants to get rid of the real physical body which doesn't allow escapeinto a comforting symbolic: `If I could have a day, an ordinary day,/away from the worry- the body- I would be happy.' I would suggestthat the body here is also the black and `other' bodies which are given voices in the collection. If Scotland cannot incorporatethese bodiesthen the prognosisis not good.

285 I'll die hefty, heaving death a weighty, ... A fucking great fucking big death.

Many of the poemsdeal directly with racism, giving a voice to those previously

silenced and objectified such as the `Hottentot Venus.' (OC, 25-26) Scotland's

history of racial intolerance is evoked through the poem `Christian Sanderson'but

contemporaryprejudice and oppressionis brought out brilliantly in a sequenceof

poems dealing with one Scottish icon of popular culture, The Broons. Publishedin

cartoon form in newspapersand then in annualsby the sectarianpublisher D. C.

Thomson, The Broons have always representeda humorous but much idolised

Scottish family. Kay attacksthe sexism,repression and racism of this idealised

family. In a four line skipping rhyme she writes:

Scotland is having a heart attack

Scotland is having a heartattack

Scotland is having a heart attack

The Broons' Bairn's Black. (OC, 61)

In `Maw Broon Visits a Therapist'(OC, 46-47)she attacks the oppressionof women

in the traditional family. Using the physical imagesand the speechfrom the cartoons

Maw finally rebels:

Weel. Am fed up wey ma bun.

It is just a big onion at the backo' ma heid.

286 A' canny let ma hair doon.

A'm built like a bothy, hefty.

A'm constantly wabbit an crabbit.

Ma hale faimily taks me for grantit.

A'll aye be the wan tae dae it.

Kay cleverly follows the conventions of therapy with Maw unable to deal with the

therapist'ssilence and take the spaceto herself

Jings, Dae A' jist talk on like this?

Michty. This is awfy awkward.

but thengetting angry begins to freelyassociate

There that's whit A' feel like -

a tatty auld rope nibiddywuid wanttae climb a' twistit andtangled an, jings this is exciting

A' could break. A' could jist give in.

287 In `PawBroon on the Starr Report' (OC, 57) the humour becomesmore savageand

disturbing as Paw insists on oral sex from Maw.

Right Maw, hen,

if thatman can

get it wey a wuman

that's no his wife,

I'm hauving it wey you.

I've ayebeen loyal.

There'sno usein you

saying `Naw Paw' again,

Christ, the President

gets it, so so kin I.

Getyir heid doonwuman,

an hae a guid sook.

In these poemsKay again usesthe techniqueof chiasmusor reversalto make the

readerrethink these innocent cultural icons so beloved of adultsand children. The

successof this reversalcomes from her skilful adoption of the dialogue, phrasingand tone of the original characters,so that it seemsto the reader familiar with the originals as if they are reading the cartoons. The physical characteristicsare subtly but faithfully representedsuch that it would be impossible to readthe originals in the samelight again. Scotland's cultural iconic family is revealedas both racist and misogynist.

288 Scotland as victim as well as victimiser is present in the collection. Scotland's

relations with England are satirised through the metaphorof teeth (a recurring

obsessionin the collection) in `Crown and Country'. (OC, 14) The poem invokes

images of the obliteration of difference and the power relations that sustainit

through the metaphorof a perfect set of teeth.

at the borderyour mouthwill be opened,flossed

and an elegant silver filling stampedinto D10.

Despite the clever punning, there are echoesof the Nazis' plundering of Jewish

mouths hereand the humour does not erasesuggestions of racial purity and the

hatred of difference. The denial of the classinequalities and the economic relations

which have sustainedEngland's relationship with Scotland are suggestedthrough the

difference in the stateof their mouths.

We do .... not talk much, we say

cheese;pints of creamy gleaming teeth,

pouring out our white grins, our old caps; smirks.

Just acrossthe border, peoplehave hellish holes,

gaping gaps, rotten roots, abscess.

In May 1999Scotland achieved once again a devolvedParliament and some degree of independencefrom England.Post-devolutionary politics andthe cultural confidencethat hascome with this hasbrought about a renewedenthusiasm to define

Scottishnessin literatureand culture. This hasled inevitablyto someessentialist

289 notions of identity in the searchfor Scottishcultural attributes. In an attempt to

distance itself from England for example,recent histories and anthologiesof poetry

have stresseda view of Scotland as Europeanrather than British. (63) Crawford

argues that such `totalising views of Scottish culture' are important in asserting

cultural self-definition againstthe marginalisation of much Scottish literature by the

English cultural centre. However he arguesthat it is now time to explorethe plurality

of Scottishculture and to speakof `Scotlands'rather than Scotland.(64) This is a

term that has becomefashionable intellectually in recent years in critical circles

influenced partly by post-colonial and post-moderntheorising.

Harwood,however, reminds us that appearancesof pluralismhailed by the term

Scotlandsmay be deceptive. She arguesthat:

`current critical debatesabout the natureand identity of post-modern Scotland oscillate precariously betweenwelcoming gesturestoward potentially subversive counter- or subculturaldiscourses and an agraphobicneed to contain these discoursesby dint of a multiculturalist rheoric in order to maintain at least a vague senseof national unity. ' (65)

This is similar to Hall's critique of the way ethnicity was used in embracing multiculturalism in Britain while actually serving to disguise continued racism. (66)

She advocatesas a strategyfor real celebration of diversity, Cixous' concept of ecriture feminine.

290 `According to her envisioning of human self -fulfilment as basedon continuous

communication processeswith oneself and one's others, an authentic Scotlandwould

have to realise itself as the hitherto unidentified live body of its people(s),expressing

themselvesin a ceaselessprocess of vibrant intercommunication,constituting

simultaneously both a unified whole and a reverberating,everchanging canon of

multiple cultural differences:Highland andLowland, male and female, white and

black, bourgeois and working-class, hetero- and homosexual,indigenous and

foreign, cosmopolitan and provincial. By becoming its own self and other - that is, its for discard own site of self-identification - Scotland could once and all the

totalising,repressive label of `Scottishness'which is essentiallyan imperialEnglish

allocation.' (67)

This is what I would argueKay's poetry beginsto do. By giving a voice to a

Scottishnesswhich is also black, femaleand lesbian or male, working classand gay

Kay createsnew categoriesof what it meansto be Scottish. Identity in Kay's work is not about a unified `I' but about the multiple possibilities of `I and you' These voices are not incorporatedas marginal to a Scottishnesswhich is central, but through the use of the Scottish vernacular,they voice that Scottishness.This is what the body of Scotlandneeds if it is not to remain sick or die:

A fucking great fucking big death.

Where do you come from? Kay's Poetic Location.

How we readKay andwhich poeticidentities we privilegedepends to a largeextent on the receptioncontext. If Kay's poetryhas been absent from mainstreamScottish

291 anthologies,it has appearedin numerous collections sometimesaligning her with

specifically black writers, sometimeswith lesbian ones, sometimeswith feminist

ones. It is possiblethen to talk of texts/versionsof Kay's writing; this is particularly

true of Kay's narrative sequencesof poemssuch as the poemswhich deal with

Amelia Rossiter performed as an operatic libretto or the sequencewhich dealswith

Bessie Smith performed as a drama.Reviews of the performancesof theseworks

will take different aspectsfrom those reviews of the printed text.

`The Adoption Papers,' like much of Kay's work, is a work that is performance

orientated and in this section I want to locate Kay as a performancepoet. Despite

the statusof western poetry as a privileged rhetorical discourse,the poetry

establishmentis logocentric. The written text, particularly the single authored

collection, is what tends to be regardedas seriouswork. As in Western discourse,

is there is a binary of oral and written -performancepoetry often associatedwith the

`pop'end of the market and more recently with marginalisedforms such as black rap.

It is interesting that someof the most impressiveperformances of recent years have come from writers speakinga voice outsidethe Metropolitan English centre. Tony

Harrison, Tom Leonard, PatienceAgbabi, Dorothea Smart and others voice in their work the elitism of the acceptedvoice of the poetry world and the exclusion and belittlement of those other voices classedas `barbarians.'(68)

Kay's concernwith identity is also necessarilya concernwith languageand voice.

Many of her poemsdeal with the loss of languageand its effects or the needto adopt new voices. For example the accomplishedpoem `Gastarbeiter' (OL, 22-23) which explores the racism of contemporaryGermany through the play on languageand

292 voice or the poem `sign' (OL, 20-21) which explores the cultural obliteration of

identity through the loss of one's tongue. In her recent collection, the poem `Teeth'

(OC, 15-16) dramatisesthe gagging and murder of Joy Gardnerat the handsof the

police. Loss of one's speechcan in extreme casesmean death.

There is a concernthroughout Kay's work with performanceas a themewhether it is

the voice of Bessie Smith, her black spiritual mother, or her family and relatives

singing Scottish and country and western songsin `Watching People Sing.' (OL, 16-

18) Indeed the theme of her novel Trumpet (69) is performance.Joss Moody is an

accomplishedperformer on the trumpet however his greatestperformance is living

his life everyday as a man, husbandand father. Gender as performanceis a recurring

theme in Kay's work. In `The Adoption Papers' both mothers are aware of how they

are supposedto perform. The adoptive mother who carriesher `secretfailure' becauseshe can't perform `that incredible natural thing/that women do' trying to make her house look `ordinary' for the social worker and the birth mother conscious of how shewill be judged, fantasisingthat the words `MOTHER GIVES BABY

AWAY' lie acrossher forehead.The daughteralso is expectedto perform, acting out her constructedracial identity: `Comeon, show/ us what you can do I thought/ you people had it in your blood. ' In the poem `DressingUp' discussedearlier, the violence of the `typical working class/Scottish'father is almost an acceptable enactmentof working-class masculinity whereasthe harmlessdressing up of the son is to the mother the ultimate performanceof transgression.She would rather he

`murdered somebodythan/that. '

293 The view that gender and sexuality are not fixed in a binary divide has been

important in recent theoretical work. Kay's work engageswith this particularly in

the figure of the transvestite.Marjorie Garber discussesthe significance of the

transvestitein the context of cultural anxietiesaround binarity. She arguesfor the

centrality of the transvestiteas an index of categorydestabilisation:

`One of the cultural functions of the transvestiteis precisely to mark this kind of

displacement, substitution, or slippage: from classto gender,gender to class;or,

equally plausibly, from genderto raceor religion. The transvestiteis both a signifier

and that which signifies the undecidability of signification. It points towards itself -

or rather toward the place where it is not.' (70)

Garber relatesthis embodied constructionof mimetic desire to Freud's concept of

the overestimation of the object, as set out in his essayon narcissismand to Lacan's

third space:she arguesthat `the transvestiteis the equivalentof Lacan's third term,

not `having,' or `being,' the phallus, but `seeming,' or `appearing'; the intervention

of a `to seem'that replacesthe to have,' in order to protect it on the one side, and mask its lack in the other.' (71) Gender as performanceand the cultural anxiety evoked by transgressingand violating genderboundaries is explored most fully through the personof loss Moody, the central enigma of Kay's novel Trumpet.The novel is very loosely basedon the true story of thirties American jazz pianist Billy

Tipton whose biological womanhood becamepublic only after his death. Set in

Glasgow the story of JossMoody, famous Scottishjazz trumpeter who lived as a man but was revealedin death to be a woman, is told in an interweaving narrative of different voices. Dominant among these voices is that of his widow Millie, the only

294 person who knew his `secret' and his adopted son Colman whose alreadyconfused

identity is thrown into crisis by the revelation. A significant changefrom the Tipton

story is Millie's collusion with the secretonce she knows and her continued, indeed

celebratory, relationshipwith Joss.This changeseems very significant in Kay's

exploration and destabilising of cultural categories.In the original story, Billy

Tipton's wife claimed never to have known about his biological womanhood. She

explained that their marriage never containedsexual intercourseand Tipton had told

her he had suffered an injury which required that he wear surgical support bandages

acrossthe middle of his body. His masqueradewas madesense of in terms of

economic and cultural factors. He wanted so badly to succeedas a jazz musician that

he cross-dressedin order to fulfil her/his potential. This `progressnarrative' is, as

Garber explores, quite common in explaining the transvestite, `normalising' it by

interpreting it in the register of socio-economicsociety. What is left out of this of

course is sexuality. As Garber arguestransvestism as progressnarrative occludes

`the power of transgressivedesire. ' (72) In terms of medical discoursesof transvestismwomen have been and are still constructeddifferently from men. From

Freud onwards there hasbeen a denial of erotic transvestismin women, the female transvestite can only be understoodas a transexual.The woman is allowed cultural desires-to be a man-but not sexualones.

It is this, I would argue,that Kay restoreswith her change:the reinstatementof the transvestiteas transgressivedesire. The focus on Joss'smaintenance of his masqueradeeven in private andMillie's collusion in it refusesthe novel's reading as a progress narrative where he had to becomea manto make it in the jazz world.

Millie falls in love and desiresJoss, believing him to be a heterosexualman. When

295 she is told of his secret,nothing significantly changesin her desire and love for him.

Indeed their sexual relationship is one of the many celebratoryaspects of their

marriage. On their wedding night shesays: `We are both drunk and laughing. He

starts to undo my green dress and we fall into bed, kissing. We go down into our

other world, till we are both drowning in each other, coming up suddenlygasping for

air and going back down again.' (p. 31) So the novel not only posesthe question of

how we define Joss but also askshow we define Millie sexually? She is no longer

reducible to the categoriesof lesbian or heterosexual.The sexual desire betweenJoss

andMillie disruptsthe binaryof sexuality.Indeed the presentationof the wedding

andin particularthe scenefamiliar from manyfilms andbooks where the newbride

gazesat herself in the mirror searchingfor the signs of her new difference is tellingly

ironic: `My flushed My cheeksare all with marriage ... eyesare the eyes of the

newlywed. My heartbeatis too fast; I can feel it under my dress.I am so excited and happy I can't eat any of the food. ' (p. 30)

Judith Butler arguesthat `The replication of heterosexualconstructs in non- heterosexualframes brings into relief the utterly constructed statusof the so-called heterosexual The parodic repetition of `the original' revealsthe original original ... to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and original. ' (73) In

Gender Trouble Butler's theory of genderas performative is developedusing

Austin's linguistic account of how effects are produced through their announcement and naming. Gender is not innate but is produced or brought into being as it is

`announced' through the stylised rituals and repetitions of everyday life. Gender is performative in so far as its signifying acts produce and reiterate the sexedbody that it then dissimulatesas prior to any description. The most obvious site for this is

296 `drag' or transvestismbut in everyday life also the theatrical acts of imitation or

mimesis circle back to the centreto insist that all genderidentification is produced

through an imitative or mimetic process.Butler usesthis argumentto push

heterosexuality from its pedestalas providing the origins of sexualroles. Pursuing

her argument of performativity in terms of psychoanalyticnotions of melancholia,

she attemptsto rewrite the resolution to the Oedipal conflict. Butler refusesFreud's

understandingof identification as a singular oedipal processthat delimits desire and

defines the boundariesof the ego. For Butler a taboo againsthomosexuality precedes

Freud's incest taboo. It is not oedipal prohibition of the mother that is primary but an

identificatory love of the samesex parent.Because of this prohibition, the lost object

of love, mother for the girl, father for the boy, becomesincorporated as a

melancholic other. The resolution of the oedipal complex thus leadsto an identification with the same sexedparent where the child in effect becomesthe lost loved one (mother or father) by incorporating and preservingthe loss within oneself

Butler thus explains how the repudiation of loss and same-sexdesire regulatesthe performance of genderedidentity. In Butler's accountheterosexuality rather than homosexuality is placed within the more unmediatedmelancholic spacewhere loss remains unacknowledgedand therefore incorporated.Heterosexuality is a more defensiveposition than homosexualitythus reversingthe normative psychoanalytic account of sex/gender.

In her later work Butler makesit clear that we can't simply pick or chooseidentities.

Butler's thesis emphasisesthe strict limits placed on performativity by the regulatory discoursesgoverning social intelligibility andinsists on a sustainingtension between

297 the performative initiation of one's self through the recitation of norms, and the way

oneis `madesubject' to thosenorms as a conditionof culturalviability:

`The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement)is precisely that the subject who

would resist such norms is itself enabled,if not produced,by such norms. Although

this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency,it does locate

agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanentto power, and not a

relation of externalopposition to power.' (74)

The significant aspectof Butler's work for Kay's text is its denaturalisationand

mobilisation of gendercategories. In Trumpet genderas performance is figured through the trope of dressingup. Millie wears a green dressat her wedding because she is not a virgin. It is bandagesand clothes that daily transform Joss from woman to man and even donning a biker helmet gives Colman a new statusof masculinity and changeshow peoplereact to him. Dress codessimultaneously regulate and critique normative categories.As Lumsden (75) points out, one of the best examples of this is the undertaker'sdescription of a body that seemsto shift gender by the simple matter of taking off or putting on clothes. Oncethe undertaker has undressed

Joss,he can see quite clearly that she is a woman but until that final moment he is convinced he is a man. `He had never had a man turn into a woman before his very eyes.He felt it to be one of those defining momentsin his life that he would be compelled to return to again and again.' (p. 111)

The novel asksus to considerwhat is Joss?Does the unmaskingof the femalebody afterdeath make him a she?Or if he haspersuaded everyone while alive that hewas

298 male, is that what he remains? This is emphasisedby the pronomial confusion, the

crisis in referentiality throughout the book. Millie and indeedmost of Joss's friends

and acquaintancesnever refers to Jossby any term other than the masculine

pronoun: hereis a description of her account of helping him transform himself daily

into a woman:

`I wrapped two cream bandagesaround his breastsevery morning, early. I wrapped

them round and round, tight. I didn't think about anything except doing it well... I

did it without thinking about it. He put a white T-shirt over the top. Over that

another T-shirt. Over that, a buttoned shirt. He put on his boxer shorts and I turned

away whilst he stuffed them with a pair of socks. He pulled on his trousers,

constantly adjusting his shirts and the stuffing. He was always more comfortable

once he was dressed. More securesomehow. My handsometall man. He'd smile at me shyly. He'd say, `How do I look?' And I'd say, `Perfect. You look perfect." (p.

238)

Suchis the powerof hervoice that we arealso drawn into this performanceand think of Jossas male.

As well as boundariesof genderand sexuality, boundariesof race are explored. Both

Joss and his adopted son are, like Kay, mixed race and through the reminiscencesof

Colman, the adopted son, Kay explores similar territory to that of `The Adoption

Papers.' The trope of border crossing is invoked by the family's move from Scotland to England. Reminiscing on his move from Glasgow to London at the age of seven, he recalls the prejudice he encounteredboth becauseof his colour and also because

299 of his Scottish accent and his strategiesfor adapting: `When we moveddown to

London I still called an ice-creama pokey hat when I was with my parentsand called

it an ice-cream with my mates. There were lots of words like that I usedbecause it

cheered them up. I was practically schizophrenic.' (p. 53) His African heritage also

is explored in terms of `passing' or performance:

`Colman doesn't feel as if he has a history. Doesn't feel comfortable with mates of

his that go on and on about Africa. It feels false to him, mates that get dressedup in

African gear, wank on about being African with a fucking cockneyaccent, man.

Back to Africa is just unreal as far as Colman is concerned.He's never beento

Africa, so how can he go back?' (p. 191)

The question of nature versusnurture andorigins is also revisited through Colman's

desire to know about his adoptive father's heritage andJoss's refusal to tell him: `My

father told he I in the it ' (p. 58) His always me and were related way mattered ...

father's gift to him which helps him reconcile himself with eventsis a letter to be

opened after his death. The reader and Colman anticipatean explanation/some

understandingof his needto live as a man but in an interesting parallel what Colman gets in the letter is the story his father refused to give him in life- the narrative of his own father's journey to Britain as a young boy at the turn of the century- a narrative of diasporaand displacement. Ironically what is passedonto Colman hereis a narrative of one individual's crossing from one culture and spaceto another.It gives

Colman an identity, a heritage of sorts, a connectionthat he needsat this point in his life.

300 Garberargues persuasively that one of the most consistentand effective functions of

the transvestitein culture is to indicate the place of what she calls categorycrisis,

disrupting or calling attention to cultural, social or aestheticdissonances:

`By category crisis I meana failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that

becomes permeable,that permits of border crossingsfrom one (apparentlydistinct)

category to another:black/white, Jew/Christian.... master/slave.The binarism

male/female,... is itself put in question or under erasurein transvestism,and a

transvestitefigure, or a transvestitemode, will always function as a sign of

overdetermination- a mechanismof displacementfrom one blurred boundary to another.' (76)

Garber arguesthat in literature and culture the figure of the transvestitein a text, particularly a text that isn't primarily about gender difference, indicatesa category crisis elsewhere,`an irresolvable conflict or epistemologicalcrux that destabilises comfortable binarity, and displacesthe resulting discomfort onto a figure that already inhabits, indeedincarnates, the margin.' (77) Not surprisingly then, Garber argues, there are a remarkablenumber of transvestitefigures in African-Amerian literature and these figures have often been ignored or marginalisd in discussionsaround race and miscegenation.

Garbersuggests that althoughthe contextualrepresentation of blackmale-to-female andfemale- to- maletransvestism differs, they both do similar kindsof culturalwork in that they `foregroundthe impossibilityof taxonomy,the fatal limit of classificationas segregation, the inevitabilityof miscegenationas misnomer.The

301 possibilityof crossingracial boundariesstirs fear of the possibilityof crossingthe

boundariesof genderand vice-versa. ' (78)

I would arguethat Kay's novel explores quite deliberately these displacements.In its

changeof original, its focus on racial and ethnic identity as performanceand the

trope of border crossing, she exploresthe concept of the `third space' and society's

anxiety about suchexcess and such crossing.The story of race and displacement

which loss leavesfor Colman is a parallel to the story of his gendercrossing and

may be the more important crossing for the adopted son who is also mixed race.

The trope of border crossingis also invoked through Kay's use of jazz. Jazz music

pervadesthe novel both in descriptionsof loss's music, snatchesof songsand also in

its narrative form. Kay statesin an interview: `Jazzis fascinating, becauseit's always

fluid, blues. Jazz is it has the past in it - work songs,slave songs, a processof

reinventing itself. And race, too, is less fixed, more fluid, in jazz. There's a senseof jazz being a family. ' (79) In a wonderful description of Joss'sperformance on his

trumpet Kay explores the dissolution of boundariesand the experienceof

`jouissance' evoked through the loss of self in performance.

`When he gets down, and he doesn't always get down deep enough, he loseshis sex, his race, his memory. He strips himself bare,takes everything off, till he's barely human All his his idiosyncrasies,his his his ... self collapses- personality, ego, sexuality, even, finally, his memory. All of it falls away like layers of skin unwrapping. He unwraps himself with his trumpet. Down at the bottom, face to face with the fact that he is nobody. The more he can be nobody the more he can

302 play that horn. Playingthe hornis not aboutbeing somebody coming from

something. It is about being nobody coming from nothing. The horn ruthlessly

strips him bare till he endsup with no body, no past, nothing.' (p. 131)

Jazz offers a potential spacein which to escapethe binary. Jazz performance

functions for Joss as a dissolution of self, a return to a presymbolic spacewhere he is

not inscribed by race or genderor sexuality. But as Kristeva (80) argues,to reject

wholly the symbolic order which sustainssocial identity is to leave oneself

unprotected and open to the full force of unconsciousdesire, of which the most

powerful is the death drive. To exist in society he must re-enterthe symbolic, he

must put himself together again:

`So when he takes off he is the whole century galloping to its close. The wide moors.

The big mouth. Scotland.Africa. Slavery. Freedom.He is a girl. A man. Everything,

nothing. He is sickness,health. The sun. The moon. Black, white. Nothing weighs

him down. Not the past or the future. He hangson to the high C and then he lets go.

Screams.Lets it go. Bends his notes and bends his body. His whole body is bent over

double. His trumpet pointing down at the floor then up at the sky. He plays another

high C. He holds on. He just keepsblowing. He is blowing his story. His story is blowing in the wind. He lets it rip. He tears himself apart. He explodes.Then he brings himself back. Slowly, slowly, piecing himself together.' (p. 136)

The critic PaulGilroy (81) haswritten of the needto understandblack writers in termsof African andAfro-American culture rather than in termspurely of western ideas. Although there are problemswith this in relation to Black British writers with

303 its suggestionof some primordial andunconscious racial history, jazz as an aesthetic

is an interesting way of looking at Kay's techniqueas a writer. Jazz has long been

regardedas a black art form which has its roots in a hybrid tradition. Dick Hebdidge

and others (82) write of the origins of suchmusic in the fusion of African rhythms,

particularly African drumming traditions brought and maintainedby the slavesto the

new world where they took aspectsof the Europeanmusic of their ownersand

created something that was new and was theirs: a fusion of African rhythm and

European harmony. Charles Keil (83) seesthe generalingredients of any Afro-

Western style as `Afiican rhythm prominent, harmony essentiallyEuropean, a

melodic fusion-but it is important to note that in the blending processthe African

rhythmic foundation absorbsand transforms the Europeanelements. ' Hebdidge (84)

arguesthat African, Afro-American and Caribbeanmusic is basedon quite different

principles from the European classicaltradition. One of the main differences is that

the collective voice is given precedenceover the individual voice of the artist or the

composer.

A key feature of such music is the conceptof `versioning'. A song/pieceof music is

composedand performed or releasedon record and several,in the caseof reggae

literally hundreds,of versions will follow each one modifying and giving a new take

on the original through use of a different instrument,tempo, key or chord sequence.

This `versioning' can be applied to The Adoption Paperswhere we have different

perspectivesvoicing their take of the sameevent. Keynotes are introduced in the

prologue which then recur at different times and in different voices through the text.

There is no closure. What there is is a constantcircling back on itself, coming back to a key melody or refrain just as in Kay's work there are certain key questionsand

304 phrasesthat we keep circling around and back to. For example `What is in my

blood?' It can also be seenin poemssuch as `Photo in the Locket' (AP, 46) and

`Dance of the Cherry Blossom' (AP, 50) and is at its most sustainedin Trumpet

where we have different takes on Joss's life but no definitive final version. One of

the key featuresof versioning is its democratic nature-thereis no one privileged

voice or version, nor is there a final one. This seemsto me a more useful way of

looking at Kay's texts than to seethem as purely dialogic or as Paraskevi

Papaleonidadoes in terms of a model of dialogic synthesis.(85)

Kay points out the fluid natureof race in jazz and this is echoedby writers such as

Keil, and Baker, Jr. who arguethat jazz and Afro-American music representsnot only a variety of mixtures betweenEuropean and African elementsbut a seriesof blendings within itself. Keil states`The great flexibility or blending capacity of

Afro-American musical forms derives primarily from a rhythmic substructurethat can incorporate with easethe most diverse melodic and harmonic resources.' (86)

A related music which figures throughout Kay's work is the blues. Kay grew up hearing black blues singersplayed in her childhood home and Bessie Smith is a recurring figure in her work. In `The Right Season,' one of the poemsfrom the

Bessie Smith sequence,the music createsa feeling of home and belonging for the black audience:

Took themto the sadplace. The placethey werescared to go.

Took themto the meanplace where they knewthey'd beenlow.

Somebodywas waiting. And it might have felt like home.

305 Somebodyknew them; somebody could see right into their soul.(OL, 11)

In this sequenceand in other poemsKay adoptsa blues rhythm and tone. The blues

have always been a migratory music carried from place to place absorbinginfluences

and effects. It is therefore music which, like Kay's speakerin `So you think I'm a

mule, ' `knows no home'. Indeed as Baker points out the blues singer's signatory

coda is always atopic and placeless.Baker arguesthat `Afro-American culture is a

complex reflexive enterprisewhich finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a

input intersecting, matrix ... a point of ceaseless and output, a web of crisscrossing

impulses always in productive transit.' Baker usesan image of a railway junction to

convey the idea of the blues as matrix:

`Polymorphousand multidirectional, scene of arrivalsand departures, place betwixt between(ever lesdeux) junctureis blues The and entre the the way stationof the ... singerand his productionare always at this intersection,the crossing,codifying force,providing resonance for experience'smultiplicities. Singer and song never arresttransience-fix it in `transcendentfoam. ' Insteadthey provideexpressive equivalencefor thejuncture's ceaseless flux. ' (87)

It is interesting in Trumpet that the railway line is also invoked in the sublime moment of performance of Josson his trumpet. `When he starts to come back from the small black point, he finds himself running along the old railway line that his mother trusted ' (p. 133) never ...

306 Baker seesfixity as a function of power. `Thosewho maintain place, who decide

what takes place and dictate what has taken place, are power brokers of the

traditional. The `placeless' by translators the Their contrast, are of nontraditional ... appropriate mark is a crossing sign at ajunction' (88) As Baker argues,the risk of

situating oneself at the crossing sign is enormous.But the benefits are beyondprice

and lead to the relinquishing of a self-certainty that strives to annul `otherness'by

masterfully fixing its own place.

The tension betweennarrative control and excessfeeling in The Adoption Papers

also echoesthe Blues. Keil, (89) invoking Weber's analysis of Western musical

evolution, looks at the way the emergentrationality of twentieth century music

seemsto entail disenchantment,demystification, and a correspondingdiminution of expressivenessfor the sake of order. Keil arguesthat many Western composershave carried on in this mode favouring music modelled on algebraic equations.The blues tradition, although it has been affected by this shift, evolved in quite an opposite direction, however, since the music has always had to satisfy strong emotional needs.

Kay's narrativeswhere emotion and feeling often exceedsand subverts narrative form invokes this struggle. The emotionally cathartic experiencefor the audience is a factor in jazz and blues. Tensionsare created musically on the spot and then released within the same song. A good example of this technique in Kay's poetry can be seen in `Dance of the Cherry Blossom' (AP, 50-51) where two male lovers with AIDS experienceboth companionshipand comfort but also suspicion and rageat who was responsiblefor transmitting the infection. The poem is written in 19 couplets whose different rhythms reflect the stagesthey go through in their feelings of togetherness;

307 suspicion,resentment and finally comingtogether in sexualunion at the endof the

poem. Thus we have the simple rhythm of the first stanza

Both of us are getting worse

Neither knows who had it first

which movesthrough shifts and parallels, at timescreating a feelingof balance`He

thinks.. think, ' `in... `back forth' `gave it to him it to ' to the .1 out' and ... gave me... tensionof

By lunchtime we're fighting over somepetty thing

He tells me I've lost my senseof humour

I tell him I'm not Glaswegian

You all think death is ajoke

Although the poem moves on in terms of narrative time and more complicated feelings and rhythms, we keep circling back to the keynote `He thinks I gave it to him /I think he gave it to me.' The tension is sustaineduntil the last three stanzas where the rhythm shifts to the lyrical and fluid final couplets where they come together as one:

He pushesme; we roll on the floor like whirlwind;

When we are done in, our lips find each other

308 We touchsoft asbreeze, caress the smallparts

Rocking back and forth, his arms becomemine

There'snothing outside but the noiseof the wind

The cherryblossom's dance through the night.

Performance then is both a central theme in Kay's work and part of her aesthetic.

Kay as Performance Poet.

Kay's work crossesboundaries of genre; she writes poetry, plays and narratives. In

her poetry she createsperformances, narratives, song sequences,even operatic

librettos. It becomesimpossible to categoriseher work easily. All her work is both

poetic and performative and in this one might align her with people like Patience

Agbabi, Adeola Martin and Ntozake Shange.This shifting of generic boundaries

relatesto the exploration of the cultural construction of identities and the need to create new spacesand genresby crossing borders.

The fluidity of performancein not fixing meaning and contesting categoriesis central to Kay's work. The dynamics of the activity of `performance' itself, the use of the body and the voice in gesture, eye contact, expression,all create a more fluid text than the fixity of the material text. The meaningof performance poetry is never constant. Like the identities Kay is exploring it is very much located in the specifics of time and space.In this way the poetry is closer to dramaand theatre. Sue Ellen

Casetaking a semiotic approachto theatreand performanceargues that `the importance of the author's intent gives way to the conditions of production and the

309 composition of the audiencein determining the meaningof the theatrical event. This

implies that there is no aestheticclosure aroundthe text, separatingit from the

conditions of its production.' (90) If we apply this to Kay's performancesthen the

audience are as important as the author/speakerin creatingmeaning and thereforethe

gender /race of the audiencematters. The particular meaningof a text is dependent

on many factors but the particular situated location of the readeris a determining

factor. While this location will shift for the reader at different junctures in her life,

the material text remainsrelatively constant.With a performance,we do not have

this same constancyof text.

SandraRichards analysing what she refersto as the `folk' element in African-

American literature arguesthat the critical tradition within African-American

literature locates `authentic' cultural expressionin those realmswith which literature

is most uncomfortable, namely in arenascentred in performance. Sheargues that in

addition to analysis of the written text, we must also consider the latent intertexts likely to be produced in performance,increasing and complicating meaning. She draws on Gennari's work on Jazz and Davis's work on the practicesof the black church to arguethat:

'a central principle of this aestheticis the juxtaposition in performanceof radical differences oftentimes understoodas binary oppositions, that generatedeep emotional responsesfrom those assembled,challenging them to imagine some interpretative resolution Not only should we analysewhat is 'there' on the page ... but imagine into discourse ... we also needto and to write critical ... contradictory positions that are likely to result from the materiality of theatre, that is from the

310 from semiotics of movement, tones, silences, ... as well as the reaction of spectators It brings the into the foreground ... spectatoror reader more and gesturestowards the

folk-custom of collaborative artistic production. And it offers a model of community

that is significant for non-theatrical activity, for the audienceis recognisedunder this

framework as both homogenousand diverse.' (91)

If we apply these ideasto Kay's work then the physical presenceof Kay becomes

another element in the meaningof the text. For many listeners to Kay's work it is a

shockthat sheis blackbecause of her soft Scottishaccent yet herperformance of

these poemsphysically through her body and her voice foregroundsthese identities, enactsthem for us and shifts our perceptionof what it meansto be Scottishand what it meansto be black. The sign of her colour and the sign of her voice contradict for many people both assumptionsabout black Britishness and assumptionsabout

Scottishness.The theatrical composite of Kay's presence,a black woman talking in a soft Scottishvoice, is challenging and becomesa factor in the meaningof the poem.

Her physical presencecombines verbal and non-verbal elements simultaneouslyso that questionsof languageand visual representationcan be addressedat the same time, through the medium of an actual body.

Kay's physical performance and the importance given to the speakingvoice aligns her also with those theorieswhich focus on the `speakingsubject' in feminist theory and in particular the work of Cixous. Central to Cixous' work is her linking of writing and performancewith the destabilising of gender and national identities.

Cixous' exhortation of women to write the body and thus speaktheir subjectivity is realised much more vividly in the context of performing poetry than writing it.

311 Cixous' associationof languagewith voice privileges the pre-oedipalmother/child

dyad, a time where sound and rhythm as well as touch are privileged more than the

visual: `The Voice sings from a time before law, beforethe Symbolic took one's

breath away and reappropriatedit into languageunder its authority of separation.

The deepest,the oldest, the loveliest Visitation. Within each woman the first

namelesslove is singing. ' (92) The very placementof the femalebody voicing her

own work positions a woman and her sexuality as speakingsubject, threateningthe

patriarchal structure with the revolutionary text of her actual body.

Locating Kay in a performancetradition allows for more fluidity and preventsher

from becoming fixed as a black poet or a lesbian poet or any other label which

privileges one aspectof her ontological reality. While such strategic location is

necessaryat specific times and in specific publishing contexts it mustn't becomea

way of fixing a poet. Kay's use of her body and her voice, her shifting between

genres mirror her thematic concernto break through the artificially created

boundarieswhich consign and confine us. To return to the poem I startedwith, `In

my country', when Kay - in answer to the hostile questioner- asserts`these parts',

she is not just talking about a specific place but all the different `parts' of her

multivalent identity.

Wheredo you comefrom?

`Here,' I said, `Here. Theseparts. '

Notes.

1. JackieKay, `In my country', OtherLovers (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993), p. 24.

312 2. Jackie Kay, `So you think I'm a mule?', A Dangerous Knowing: Four Black

WomenPoets (London: ShebaFeminist Publishers, 1998).

3. Seefor examplethe tendencyto publishKay in anthologiesof blackpoetry

ratherthan Scottishpoetry discussed later in the chapter.

4. StuartHall. `NewEthnicities' in A. Rattansiand J. Donald(eds. ) `Race',Culture

and Difference (London: Sage, 1992),pp. 252-259 (255).

5. ibid., p. 258.

6. JackieKay, `Kail andCaliloo', in ShabnamGrewal et al (eds.) Chartingthe

Journey:Writings by Blackand Third World Women,(London: Sheba Feminist

Publishers, 1988), pp.195-197.

7. Liz refers to the Scottishpoet Liz Lochhead.

8. GayatriChakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds:Essays in CulturalPolitics

(London:Routledge, 1987).

9. GabrielleGriffin arguesthat Kay resists`incorporation' into the mainstream.See

GabrielleGriffin, 'In/Corporation?Jackie Kay's The AdoptionPapers' in Vicki

Bertram(ed. ) KickingDaffodils: Twentieth-century WomenPoets (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1997),pp. 169-177.

10.Jackie Kay, TheAdoption Papers (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991); hereafter, AP.

All furtherreferences to this collectionwill appearin the text.

11. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 111.

12. `Living Memory:Meeting Toni Morrison' in PaulGilroy (ed.) SmallActs

(London: SerpentsTail, 1994),pp. 175-182(178).

13. Seefor exampleEstelle Jelinek (ed.), Women'sAutobiography: Essaysin

Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Shari Benstock(ed. ),

The Private Self (London: Routledge, 1988);Liz Stanley, TheAuto/Biographical

313 I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Auto/Biography (Manchester:Manchester

University Press, 1992).

14. Shari Benstock, `Authorising the Autobiographical' in The Privale Self (London:

Routledge, 1988).

15. SusanStanford Friedman, `Women's Autobiographical Selves' in The Private

Self.

16. Nancy Chodorow, Psychoanalysisand the Sociology of Gender(Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1978).

17. ibid., p. 206.

18. Seefor exampleJoanna Ryan, `Psychoanalysis and Women Loving Women'in

Helen Crowley and SusanHimmelweit (eds.), Knowing Women:Feminism and

Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity Press,1992); Toril Moi, `Patriarchalthought and

the drive for knowledge' in TeresaBrennan (ed.), BetweenFeminism and

Psychoanalysis(London: Routledge, 1989); J. Doane and D. Hodges, From

Klein to Kristeva. PsychoanalyticFeminism and the searchfor the `Good

Enough' mother (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

19. NancyChodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1989).

20. Seefor exampleJessica Benjamin, Like Subjects,Love Objects: Essays on

Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

21. Audre Lorde, Zami (London: Pandora,1982), prologue, p. xvi.

22. Dorothy McMillan, `Twentieth - century Poetry I I' in Gifford and McMillan

(eds.), A History of ScottishWomen's Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 1997).

23. Chodorow, Psychoanalysisand the Sociology of Gender, p. 201.

314 24. Ann Sexton, `The Abortion' in The CompletePoems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1981), p. 61.

25. Benstock, `Authorising the Autobiographical' in The Private Self, p. 20.

26. Griffin, `In/Corporation? Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers',p. 169.

27. JackieKay, `Bed', Off Colour (Newcastle:Bloodaxe, 1998), pp. 43-44;hereafter,

OC. All furtherreferences to this collectionwill appearin the text.

28. Cited in Olu Oguibe, Sojourners: new writings by Africans in Britain (African

Refugee Publishing Collective, 1994),p. xxi.

29. Seefor exampleAdrienne Rich, Of WomanBorn (NewYork: W. W. Norton,

1976); Roszika Parker, Torn in Two: the Experienceof Maternal Ambivalence

(London: Virago, 1995);Aminatta Forna, `Mothers of Africa and the Diaspora'

in Kwesi Owusu (ed.), Black British Culture and Society (London: Routledge,

2000).

30. Mike Leigh, Secretsand Lies.(videorecording) ( London: Channel 4,2001)

31. Rodney Pybus, `Poetry Chronicle 11' in Stand 36,2 (1995), p. 55.

32. Lorde, Zami, p. xxx.

33. Jackie Kay, BessieSmith (Bath: Absolute Press, 1997).

34. SusanStanford Friedman in Benstock,The Private Self,, p. 38.

35. See for example Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: The Crossing Press,

1984);Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness

and the Politics of Empowerment(London: HarperCollins, 1990).

36. RichardDyer, White(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 10.

37. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1984),p. 152.

315 38. Paul Gilroy, ThereAin't no Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson,

1987).

39. Friedman in Benstock, The Private Self, pp. 40-41.

40. RebeccaE. Wilsonand Gillean Somerville-Arjat(eds. ), Sleepingwith Monsters:

Conversationswith Scottishand Irish WomenPoets (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990),

p. 122.

41. Eavan Boland, `A Habitable Grief, TheLost Land (Manchester:Carcanet,

1998), p. 29.

42. Seefor examplein recentyears Lemn Sissay, The Fire People(Edinburgh:

Payback, 1998) and Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay,IC3: The Penguin Book

of New Black Writing in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000).

43. See,for example,Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah (eds.), TheNew Penguin

Book of ScottishVerse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000).

44. Helen Kidd, `Writing Near The Fault Line' in Kicking Daffodils, pp. 95-110.

45. See for exampleAileen Christiansonand Alison Lumsden (eds.), Contemporary

ScottishWomen Writers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and

Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds.), A History of Scottish Women's

Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1997).

46. RobertCrawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).

47. Linda Colley,Britons: Forging theNation, 1707-1837(New Haven: Yale

UniversityPress, 1992).

48. Kath Woodward(ed. ), QuestioningIdentity: Gender, Class, Nation (London:

Routledge, 2000).

49. ErnstGeilner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1983).

50. Crawford,Devolving English Literature.

316 51. Alan Bold, ModernScottish Literature (London: Longman, 1983).

52. Berthold Schoene-Harwood,`Emerging as the Other of Our Selves- Scottish

Multiculturalism and the Challengeof the Body in PostcolonialRepresentation'

in Scottish Literary Journal, 25: 1 (May, 1998), p. 54-72 (59).

53. ibid., p. 60.

54. ibid., p. 60.

55. Eavan Boland, `Daughtersof Colony: A PersonalInterpretation of the place of

Gender Issues in the Postcolonial Interpretation of Irish Literature' in Eire-Ireland,

37,2-3, (1997) pp. 7-20.

56. RobertCrawford, `Dedefining Scotland' in SusanBassnett (ed. ), StudyingBritish

Cultures(London: Routledge, 1997) p. 85.

57. The other feature often regardedas particularly Scottish is the concept of the

Caledonian Antisyzygy, a model suggestedby the Scottish critic Gregory Smith in

Scottish Literature, Character and Influence in 1919and made popular by

McDiarmid. It refers to the way extremesof fantasy/realismare often juxtaposed in

Scottish writing and focuseson the figures of oppositesand doubles.However, I would arguethis in itself createsyet anotherbinary.

58. Carol Anderson and Aileen M. Riddell, `The Other Great Unknowns: Women

Fiction Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century' in Gifford and McMillan (eds.), A

History of Scottish Women'sWriting (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

1997).

59. DorothyMcMillan, `Twentieth-centuryPoetry 11' in Gifford andMcMillan.

60. Seefor examplepoets such as Kathleen Jamie and Elizabeth Burns.

317 61. Alison Lumsden, `Jackie Kay's Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity' in

Christiansenand Lumsden (eds.), ContemporaryScottish WomenWriters

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2000), p. 85.

62. ibid., p. 85.

63. See,for example,Duncan Glen and Peter France(eds. ), European Poetry in

Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1989) and Derick Thomson (ed.),

European Poetry in Gaelic (Glasgow: Gairm, 1990).

64. Crawford, `Dedefining Scotland', p. 93.

65. Berthold Schoene-Harwood,`Emerging as the Other of Our Selves- Scottish

Multiculturalism and the Challengeof the Body in PostcolonialRepresentation', p.

55.

66. Stuart Hall, `New Ethnicities'.

67. Harwood,`Emerging as the Otherof Our Selves- ScottishMulticulturalism and

the Challengeof the Body in PostcolonialRepresentation', p. 69.

68. Seefor example Tony Harrison, `Them & [uz)' in SelectedPoems

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987),p. 123.

69. Jackie Kay, Trumpet,(London: Picador, 1998). All further referencesto this

novel will appearin the text.

70. Marjorie Garber, VestedInterests, (London: Routledge, 1992),p. 36-37.

71. ibid., p. 121.

72. ibid., p. 71.

73. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 31.

74. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993),p. 15.

75. Lumsden, `Jackie Kay's Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity'.

76. Garber, VestedInterests, p. 16.

318 77. ibid. p. 17.

78. ibid. p. 274.

79. Interview with Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, Dec. 5,1998.

80. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

81. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1993).

82. Dick Hebdidge, Cut and Mix (London: Comedia, 1987).

83. Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1966), p. 30.

84. Hebdidge, Cut and Mix.

85. ParaskeviPapaleonida, "holding my beads in my hand': Dialogue, Synthesis

and Power in the Poetry of Jackie Kay and Grace Nicholls' in Bertram (ed.),

Kicking Daffodils, pp. 125-137.

86. Keil, UrbanBlues, pp. 33-34.

87. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press,1984), p. 7.

88. ibid., p. 202.

89. Keil, p. 74.

90. Sue Ellen Case, 'Towards a New Poetics' in Lizbeth Goodman (ed.), The

RoutledgeReader in Gender and Performance (London and New York:

Routledge, 1998), pp. 143-148(144).

91. SandraRichards, `Writing the Absent Potential' in Andrew Parker and Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick (eds.), Performativity and Performance (London:

Routledge, 1995), pp. 72-73.

319 92. HeleneCixous, `Sorties' in AntonyEasthope and Kate McGowan (eds. ), A

Critical and Cultural TheoryReader (Buckingham: Open University Press,

1992), p. 153.

320 Conclusion.

I ... remembermy tongue sheddingits skin like a snake,my voice

in the classroom soundingjust like the rest. Do I only think

I lost a river, culture, speech,sense of first space

and the right place?Now, Wheredo you comefrom?

Strangersask. Originally? And I hesitate.(1)

The three poets consideredhere explore the varied meaningsof home, country and

belonging to them as women. They all shareas poets an ex-centric identity, bringing

to their writing a hybridity which locates them, if not outside then at an angle to the

English cultural centre. A gradual internationalising of form and subject has been a

feature of British poetry in the period 1970-2000.The influence of different cultures

and traditions, the rise of regional literatures and the growth of literature in

translationhave all contributedto challengingcanonical notions of poeticauthority.

As I statedin Chapter1, many women poets writing andpublishing in the U. K.

since1970 write out of dualor multiplecultural heritages. Why this phenomenonis

so markedin women'spoetry raises interesting questions beyond the scopeof this

study,however the threewriters considered here can be seenas representativeof this phenomenon.

While they explorethe meaningsof home,country and belonging in differentways, I haveshown that there are commonalitiesin their positioningof themselvesand their themes. 321 In my introduction I statedmy belief that each text speaksfrom its moment of

production. The three poets consideredhere all write as women who engagewith the

impact of secondwave feminism at both a material and an intellectual level. At a

material level their work has been publishedin feminist magazinesand by feminist

publishers. For both Roberts and Kay suchspaces were important in providing an

initial spaceand critical context for their work. For Boland who startedpublishing

in the late 60s with a mainstreampublishing house,a feminist press provided a

publishing spacewhen her work was deemedtoo radical for the mainstream.

Although articulating their relation to the label of feminist poet differently, their

writing engageswith the ideasand agendasof the feminist movement in the U. K.,

Ireland and Europe throughout the period from 1970-2000.In Roberts' work this is

most marked in her intertextualising of ideasassociated with French feminist

psychoanalytic theory. In Kay's work feminist debatesaround difference and the

politics of identity are part of her subject matter. For Boland the needto re-evaluate

the private and domestic into a tradition which has excludedit is a central part of her

poetic project.

A recurring theme in poetry during this period has been the poet's concernwith voice and ownership of language.A concernwith who has the permission and status to speakposited languageas a site of struggle and ambivalencefor many poets who did not speakwith a traditional poetic authority. Previously marginalised voices and accentschalleged both the canon and the constructionof the poet. The individual poetic voice and its relationshipto the dominant culture is explored by all three of the poets consideredhere and is central to Boland's poetry and essays.One of her

322 concerns is the gap betweenthe perceptionof womanhood in Ireland and the

perception of the poet. A remark madeby a young woman poet at a poetry

workshop and recalled by Boland illustrates this gap well: `If I called myself a poet,

peoplewould think I didn't washmy windows.' (2)

This concernwith claiming the statusof poet and finding a voice also manifestsitself

in the foregrounding of the personalin the work of many women poets of this time.

A feature of the critical orthodoxy during this period was the embracingof an

aestheticof depersonalisationand abstraction.This was linked to the theoretical shift

from the notion of an authentic self or ground of history `to the post-modernsocial

constructivism of self and history as a plurality of islands of discourse.' (3) Waugh,

Armstrong and others make the point that at the precisemoment in the 70s when

women on a large scale begin to find a seriousand politicised voice within poetry,

the novel and other forms, white western male critics start to under mine the

category of art and of the author as meaningful. (4) Boland, Roberts and Kay resist

this aesthetic.They foreground the personalin their work while at the sametime

exploring the construction of identity and subjectivity in relation to gender, `race', nation and sexuality.

Waugh arguesthat the literature of the period 1960-1990produced `an insatiable yearning towards plenitude,' and `reflected the powerfully desiring nature of the times: haunted by a nostalgiafor wholenessyet increasingly and self-defensively sceptical of its attainment.' (5) In the poets consideredhere this is exploredthrough the interrogation of the equationof the `mother' with `home'. In the poetry of

Roberts it manifests itself in the desire to return to the imaginary, to a stateof fusion

323 andwholeness associated with the pre-oedipal.For Bolandit is thetrope of the land

as motherthat shetries to de-and reconstruct in herpoetry. For Kay the motheris

alwaysimaginary not only in the senseof the pre-oedipalbut constructedalways in

her imagination,someone who is `too manyimaginings to beflesh and blood'. (6)

All threewriters explore the headydesire of a myth of return,the way this desire

shapesour senseof ourselvesas subjectsand the impossibilityof this returnto the

originarysite.

Themes of dispossessionand exile are prevalent in the work of all three poets, both

in relation to country and to language.Although all three draw on personal

experience here,this senseof dispossessionis not individualistic and Boland and

Kay connect through their poetry with those who are dispossessedand oppressedin

both the present and the past. Languageas defenceagainst and compensationfor loss

and displacementis explored by both Boland and Roberts.

All three challenge a dominant and masculinist construct of home as the spaceof an authentic and rooted self located in a specific time, place and culture. All are suspiciousof narrativesof nation that producea coherent history and identity by exclusion and reductionism. For Boland the narrative of Ireland produced by revivalism colonises women by its reduction of them to simple tropes. Her work considershow nationalist disengagementfrom the colonial can reiterate colonial structuresespecially in relation to women. Kay's work challengesthose versions of nation whether Scottishor English that assumehomogeneity and fail to acknowledge their role in the historical cast of racialised relations. Roberts challengesa model of individual and national identity formation basedon the expulsion and projection of

324 aspectsof ourselvesto createthe `other', the `foreigner'. Her writing challengesand

subvertsdualistic ways of perceivingthe world andinvites the readerto embracethe

stranger in herself.

Opposingthe traditionalnotion of homein termsof rootsor originsis the discourse

of nomadismdeveloped by Deleuzeand Guattari and taken up by Braidottiand

others.(7) As the namesuggests, nomadism involves forms of lateralresistance to

any assertionof hegemoniccontrol through strategies of multiplicity, formsof

deterritorialisationand the dissolutionof culturaland territorial boundaries.

While such mobile subjectivity is celebratedby postmodernism,it is problematic for

many women who have beenforced to leave their homesbecause of colonialism and

poverty. Boland and Kay both addressthis in their poetry. The needfor some sense

of home as a point of arrival if not departureis there in Boland's writing in particular

which is hauntedby the history of emigrant Irish women:

Like oil lamps we put them out the back,

of our houses,of our minds.We hadlights betterthan, newer than andthen

a time came,this time andnow we needthem. Their dread,makeshift example. (8)

All three writers do however explore home as a place of flux rather than stasis,a point of arrival rather than return. This is particularly the casefor Kay who

325 challengesthroughout her writing the notion of home as a myth of return. When she

writes in `Kail and Caliloo'

I'm no forgettingthe roadsand the milesthough

whensomeone sings Ae fond kiss

I can still tremble

or Will Ye go Lassiego

Aye Actually. I'd love to go to Lagos someday

andI'll ayebe backagain. (9)

she is articulating the primacy of her Scottishculture as well as embracingthe part of

herself which is Nigerian.

In articulating a position between rootednessand nomadism, Stuart Hall's ideas

expressedin his essay `Cultural identity and diaspora' are useful. He suggeststhat

one way of thinking about cultural identity is to perceiveit as a matter of `becoming'

as well as being:

`Cultural identities come from somewhere,have histories.But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constanttransformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialisedpast, they are subject to the continuous `play' of history, culture and Far from being in `recovery' the identities power. grounded a mere of past .... are the nameswe give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrativesof the past.' (10)

326 Hall argues for the recognition of difference but not one which is fixed in the rigidity

of binary opposition. He suggeststhat meaning,while being constructedthrough

difference,is neverfixed andmakes use of Derrida'snotion of differance,where

meaning is always deferred,never finished or completed. Hall's position stressesthe

fluid and strategic nature of identity, identity as positionedin a particular time and

spacebut not fixed and permanent. Thoselaying claim to identity are not only

positioned by identity, they are able to position themselvesand are able to

reconstruct and transform historical identities.

Rather than a homogenousnational culture, the poets hereadvocate biculturalism

and the inheritanceof a diversity of fragmentedtraditions as a sourceof creativity,

a dynamic where there is a constantmixing of heritageand traditions and a constant

movementtowards their identification and reformulation.

As Cairns Craig writes `all cultures exist not in themselves- in the autonomy and

the autotelic trajectory of their own narratives- but in the relation between

themselvesand others. Culture is not an organism,nor a totality, nor a unity: it is the

site of dialogue, it is a dialectic, a dialect. It is being between.' (11)

Notes.

1. Carol Ann Duffy, `Originally', SelectedPoems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 65-66.

2. NancyMeans Wright andDennis J. Hannan,`Questions and Answers with Eavan

Boland,' Irish Literary Supplement,10,10 991), pp. 10-11,(10).

3. Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties (Oxford: 0. U. P., 1995), p. 38.

327 4. Isobel Armstrong, `Sowhat's all this about the mother's body?: The aesthetic,

gender and the polis' in Women:a cultural review 4,2 (1993), pp. 172-187.

5. Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties.

6. Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Newcastle:Bloodaxe, 1991),p. 33.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, `Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine'

in A Thousand Plateaus(London: Athlone Press, 1980) and Rosi Braidotti, Patterns

of Dissonance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

8. Eavan Boland, `The Emigrant Irish', Collected Poems(Manchester: Carcanet,

1995), p. 129.

9. Jackie Kay, `Keil and Caliloo', in ShabnamGrewal et al (eds.), Charting the

Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women,(London: ShebaFeminist

Publishers, 1988), pp. 195-197.

10. Stuart Hall, `Cultural Identity and Diaspora' in J. Rutherford (ed.), Identity: community, culture, difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990)pp. 222-237

(225).

11. Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottishand British

Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996),pp. 205-206,

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